


Fates Much Worse

by Darkenning



Category: Dangan Ronpa
Genre: Homophobic Language, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-14
Updated: 2015-07-24
Packaged: 2018-02-21 03:09:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 6
Words: 25,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2452535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkenning/pseuds/Darkenning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It is so funny that you of all people should not realize what a liar I am." Dying is easy; despair isn't nearly as cheap a date. Lemons in later chapters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Carnivorous](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1050649) by [Teakay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teakay/pseuds/Teakay). 



> _Danganronpa_ is the property of Spike Chunsoft, not me. This is parody, protected speech.

She crouched on the bathroom floor, clutching her broken wrist and trying very hard not to descend into a blind panic. Since it was fair to say that she'd been on the verge of one ever since she'd watched the video showing her what had happened to her friends, restraining herself wasn't easy. But she had hope. She still had hope.

Chiefly, at the moment, what she was hoping was that the dumbass on the other side of the stuck bathroom door would get bored with trying to break it down with his dumbass muscles and just go back to his room with dumbass plans to complain about her the next day. By then, she was sure, she'd have a good explanation for what she'd failed to do. No, not failed, only pretended to do. Pretended. That was much better. She'd just been pretending to make an attempt to kill the dumbass, so that ... so that ... okay, the counterfactual scenario was going to take some work, which she'd be able to do just as soon as the dumbass stopped banging on the door, already!

But she knew that it was going to be okay, because even if the dumbass did manage to get the door down, she still had the knife. Which she could use in her other hand. Even if she wasn't left-handed. So it was okay, she was going to get out of this just fine and then she was going to get out of the school and go out and be even more famous than she'd been before because that was her destiny dammit her destiny and nobody not the dumbass and not a psychopathic bear-thingy was going to get in the way of her destiny and -

The stuck door came unstuck.

"Okay," the dumbass said as he pushed his way through. "Let's just calm down and talk about this!"

He was going to kill her. He was going to try and kill her just because she'd been pretending to try and kill him. Really it was good that things were like that because if he was going to try and kill her then she had every right nay even a DUTY to kill him right back! "Stay away from me!" she shrieked as she charged towards him, waving the knife awkwardly. Surely this would make him run away!

Why wasn't the dumbass running away?!

"Hey, stop that!" he yelled as he grabbed hold of her left wrist and also her right, sending searing pain shrieking up her right arm. She twisted in his grip, cutting him slightly again, and then he pushed her arms back -

And there was a sudden explosion of much colder pain in her chest. Nearly frozen, she managed to look down to see the knife there, most of the blade buried just under her breastbone, blood flowing from the wound. For what felt like a lot longer than a second, she stood there, staring at it ... then lost her footing and fell back against the wall.

"What the fuck did you just make me do?" the dumbass shrieked, sounding as terrified as she should be.

But she wasn't scared. Really, that made the whole thing all right. For the first time in forever, she wasn't afraid anymore. The worst had happened, and now ... now nothing mattered anymore.

Almost nothing. She managed to lift a hand, reached for the knife and felt the blood covering her fingers. There. That should do it. Now to get her hand behind her back so the dumbass, who was still blaming her for all this as he stomped around in the bedroom, freaking out instead of doing the sensible thing and trying to help her, wouldn't be able to see what she'd done. And though it was awkward and she couldn't tell if she'd succeeded, she had a hunch that it was going to work out. They'd figure it out. Some of them would figure it out.

She was never going to graduate.

But maybe one of them would.

Maybe _he _would -__

Oh. Yeah. He was going to be upset about this, wasn't he ...

Oh well.

And then there was nothing but inky blackness.

* * *

And then Maizono Sayaka woke up. She drew in a deep breath, wondering at the lingering pain in her chest, since everything that had happened had surely just been a horrible horrible dream that she wanted only to forget ...

But then why couldn't she see anything? Her eyes were open, after all ... but everything was the same whether she opened or closed them. She lifted up her hands - hand, rather, since one of her arms wasn't responding to her thoughts - and found that something was surrounding her, something ... plastic-like. What? What was going on here? Why was she in some kind of a bag? Where was she? What -

Then another sound intruded. A zipper noise, brief, faint, but immediately catching her attention because as it came to her, there was another sensory impression that accompanied it. Light! Light coming through a tiny white hole in the darkness, just above her head. Naturally, she reached for it.

More zipper noise, as her hand contacted metal. She pushed down instinctively, and the tiny white hole expanded, and she lifted her head up out of it ...

And looked blearily down at the black rubber bag her head was protruding out of.

She'd seen these kind of bags before, on television. She knew what they were called.

That was when she started screaming.

Fortunately, her complete loss of composure was relatively short-lived. While she lay there and screamed her head off, the impotent thrashing motions of her panic shifted her weight enough to send herself tumbling off of whatever tabletop or other surface she was resting on. She dropped helplessly to the floor below - only about a meter or so - and the shock of actual physical pain, particularly intense on her right arm, was enough to shock her out of the hysteria. Of course, that meant that she had to deal with the pain.

After a moment, when the pain had eased enough to let her move again, she reached up with her good hand and pushed down the zipper of the ... the _bag_. (Her internal narrative jerked away from the more elaborate term.) That allowed her to get a good look at her current condition for the first time. She was wearing what looked a bit like the gown that she'd worn the last time she'd been admitted to a hospital - not a pleasant set of memories - and her right arm was heavily bandaged and wrapped up in a sling against her chest.

That meant that her wrist really had been broken. Swallowing, she lifted up her left arm to touch the area where the knife had gone in. She could detect what felt like bandages under the smock, and flinched a bit at the pain that her own touch caused her. But she'd thought ... no, she'd been sure that it was a fatal injury. On the other hand, what did she really know about such things? It wasn't like she'd ever been killed before.

Slowly, awkwardly, she got to her feet and took a look around. The room, like every room in the school, had no windows. (Was she still in the school? Maybe she shouldn't assume.) It didn't have much of anything, except for a door, a set of cold fluorescent lights in the ceiling, and the table - on rollers, she'd noticed - from which she'd just fallen. Wait, now that she took a look, there was something else. The head of the table - at least she thought it was the head, since she _thought_ that her own head had been looking out at the world from that direction when she poked her head out of the bag - was near a panel in the wall that looked like a miniature garage door.

It had a handle. Hesitantly, she reached out with her good hand for that handle.

Before she touched it, however, there was a buzzing noise that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Simultaneously, the table rolled on its own power so that it bumped into the wall just below the panel. A second buzz, and then the panel slid open very quickly. Then, with a whoosh, a black rubber bag shot out of the panel and landed on the table. At that sight, she jerked back, and so when the panel closed just as quickly as it opened, she wasn't in any position to try and hold it open, even if she'd wanted to do so.

Not that such considerations were much on her mind at the moment. Her attention was riveted on the bag. And this time, she had less difficulty giving the bag its proper name - the body bag. It was clearly just as occupied as the one she'd just escaped had been, but she couldn't even begin to guess at the condition of that occupant. Every bit as hesitantly as before, she reached out for the bag's zipper.

Once again, events outpaced her attempts to interact with them. The zipper started to wiggle slightly, and then slid down just a few notches, enough that a pair of red-nailed fingers could poke out of the tiny opening, and push down on it. Once the hole was large enough for a head to push through, the fingers dropped out of sight, and a strawberry-blonde set of hair began to slowly push itself out of the hole. Somewhat dazedly, Maizono found herself remembering and comparing the present situation to the sight of a baby's head 'crowning' as had been featured in a sex ed video she'd watched, years before.

And then the face of the other girl exposed itself. She looked blearily about. "Wow," said Enoshima Junko. "That really sucked."

Sayaka swallowed, then hoarsely spoke up. "Enoshima-san?"

The other girl's icy blue eyes, which had been looking blearily around the room, abruptly settled on her with their usual disconcerting laser-like focus. "Uh," she said. "Maizono. I'd say this was a surprise except that it's not really except for the parts that are, y'know?"

"No," Sayaka answered. "Did, did he get you too? Did you walk in on him while he was cleaning up and -"

"Cleaning - oh, you're talking about the guy who iced you," the model said. "Nah. I mouthed off to our esteemed headmaster and so he made an example out of me. And then, well ..."

Sayaka felt the panic swelling up again. "We're dead? This ... this is what happens after we die?" She looked around at the sterile room. "What kind of sick afterlife -"

"It's not like that," Enoshima interrupted, her affected dialect momentarily in abeyance. "This isn't the afterlife. We didn't die. It's a lot more complicated than that."

"What do you mean, Enoshima-san?" Sayaka asked in an unhappy tone that nonetheless wasn't a whine, because she wasn't a whiner.

"Oh quit whining," the other said disgustedly. Then she closed her eyes. "And ... while you're at it, you might as well stop calling me that. My name isn't Enoshima Junko. It's Mukuro. Ikusaba Mukuro."

"Huh?" Sayaka inquired calmly and without any confusion.

'Enoshima' shook her head. "It's ... tell you what, I'll explain everything if you help me out of this thing."

Hesitantly, Sayaka reached forward and pulled the body bag's zipper the rest of the way down, exposing the other girl's torso - which was covered with a gown just like the one she was wearing. But her upper arms were heavily bandaged, and from the looks of things the bandages extended onto her torso as well. Whatever had happened to her was clearly a lot more traumatic, at least in a physical sense, than Sayaka's injuries had been.

The girl - whom she supposed that she should get into the habit of thinking of as Ikusaba, now - looked down at herself and let out an annoyed sigh. "There goes my perfect record," she mumbled.

"Huh?" Sayaka repeated.

"Nothing, nothing, never mind, not important. Okay, it's kind of a long story, but the short version is, I'm Junko's twin sister -"

"But you said your name -"

"What did I _just_ say about it being a long story? Look, for reasons that I don't want to go into right now, I was posing as my sister on our first day of school and got caught up in all of this. And then ... well, the mastermind found out about it, and recruited me to work as a secret agent inside your group. If I didn't do what I was told, something horrible would happen to my little sister ... and nothing else in the world matters to me as much as she does."

"The mastermind?" Sayaka asked, blinking.

"The person who's running Monobear. Come on, he's obviously a robot, you had to have figured that part out, right?"

Sayaka, who of course had, blinked. "Then ... you know who's behind all of this?" she asked.

Ikusaba let out a long sigh. "No," she lied. "I only met the mastermind, I don't know their name and I didn't recognize that person's face. I don't know what all this is about ... but I do know what's happening now. In between Monobear killing me and waking up here, I woke up somewhere else and had it all explained to me."

It had been a very unusual conversation.

* * *

When Mukuro had woken up, she had been in more pain than she could ever remember having endured. The sheer torment was almost enough to drive her back into unconsciousness, but she knew that it was important to stay awake. Very, very important.

Because _she_ was there, looking down at her expressionlessly with a face that was almost a mirror of her own. _Almost._ Mukuro had nearly panicked when the slight difference had been pointed out, earlier. There was a strong urge to ask her if that was the reason for all of this, but she quelled it. There was something much more important to say. Much, much more important.

"... I'm ... sorry ..." she said.

Junko simply nodded. "It's all right," she said, soothingly. And that, more than anything else, told Mukuro that awful things, far worse than having spears explode into your chest, were in the offing. "It's all just part of the plan. Oh, not the plan I told you about, that was complete bullshit that I came up with to get you to act the right way. I'm talking about the real plan." Abruptly there was a crown on her head. "Are you not entertained by my godlike brilliance?" she asked haughtily.

"Uh-huh," Mukuro replied. She didn't like the queen act. She hadn't liked the person it was based on very much, and thought that her sister would have done better to imitate the one of their circle of acquaintances who actually was royalty. But that wasn't the sort of thing you could really tell someone like Junko. "Can ... I ask ... something?"

"Why certainly, Muku-chan!" Junko enthused cutely.

This was a more tolerable mask. Slightly. "How'm I ... alive?"

From the look on her sister's face, she'd known that was a mistake. "Dumb, dumb, dumb big sister!" she spewed out cutely. "Don't you know? Don't you know? We are Ultimate Despair! We have tons and tons and tons of really, really smaaaaaart Ultimate Mad Scientists and Ultimate Unethical Doctors and Ultimate You Get The Ideas working for us! With allllll of thaaaat, it's easy-peasy." Glasses appeared on her face. "The design of a method to induce a state similar to death, slowing down all biological functions to the point where only the most intrusive examination could determine the subject's actual state, occurred almost simultaneously with the discovery of a method of inducing rapid regrowth of injured tissue," she explained clinically.

"Oh," Mukuro said. That did make sense. As much as anything that had ever happened to either of them did. "Then -"

"I used it at half-strength before we started this little chat," Real-Junko explained. "That's why you're in pain. This is your punishment for screwing up."

"... thank you."

"You're welcome. And now, we come to the actual plan."

"You said ... they were going to die ... you said ..."

"Mukuro-chan. Dear, sweet Mukuro-chan. My best-beloved and utterly useless big sister. It is so funny that you of all people should not realize _what a liar I am_." And now she grinned. "We're going to do much worse things to them than that. Are you ready to play your new role in all of this?"

There was really only one answer she could give to that question from her little sister, who was the most important person in the world to her, whom she did not want to see suffer the horrible fate of becoming so bored with the world that her anger turned inward again. There was really only one answer that she could give.

So she gave it.

* * *

"Wait," said Sayaka. "Waitwaitwaitwait. How's that again?"

Ikusaba paused in her necessarily abbreviated account of that meeting, which omitted any details that might give Sayaka a clue as to the mastermind's true identity. "Which part?"

"The, the part about how we, we slow down, and ... how does that ... it doesn't make any sense," she concluded. "I don't remember being injected with anything -"

"Do you remember anything that happened between your arrival at the school and when you woke up in the classroom?" Ikusaba asked patiently. "No? Of course not. It was probably then, that we were all injected with something that would release that drug if we ever suffered an injury bad enough to kill us."

"But ... but, no, that doesn't make any sense," the idol protested. "We're being manipulated into trying to kill each other, but when we do, the people we kill don't actually die? Why would anyone do that? It doesn't make sense."

"Well," said Ikusaba cheerfully. "It's a good thing, then, then it doesn't have to make sense. Isn't it? So then you don't have to make any sense out of it. You just have to figure out how you're going to survive it. Improvise, adapt, and overcome. You've shown that you can do that by trying to kill all of us." That part was delivered cheerfully too.

Sayaka rocked back. "I ... I never did, I just ... I was _pretending_ and -"

"Lie to yourself all you like. I'm not interested in your justifications, right now. We need to find out what the rest of the situation is. Presumably, we're not going to just be stuck in this room forever, or there wouldn't be a door. Does it open?"

Still stunned a bit by that last wholly unfair accusation, all that Sayaka could do was to repeat, "Open?"

"Yes, that thing that doors generally do unless they happen to be locked. Or stuck. You may have observed it happening in the recent past."

Sayaka tried to stammer out a reply, but Ikusaba was already in motion, walking over to the door and turning the handle. "Oh, look, it does open!" she said. "Are you coming or would you rather wait here?"

Following along behind the far more aggressive girl, Sayaka soon found that the door led to another hallway - a long one, almost exactly as long as the hallway where their rooms were located back in the main body of the school. It was like that hallway in more than just length, though, for there were other doors all along both sides of it at even intervals, with name plates just beside them. At the very far end, the nameplates for the doors had pictures of the two of them on it, just like their rooms back there had - well, almost like them. Those pictures hadn't had their eyes exxed out.

Just beyond that point, the hallway opened up into a large room filled with couches, chairs and tables, and with a large viewscreen on one wall. As they arrived in that room, pausing to take it in, the viewscreen flared to life, and they were treated to the sight of the people they'd left behind standing in a circle in a room somewhere.

"What -" said Sayaka.

And then what was going on became very clear, as Monobear on the screen proclaimed, "Let's start off with a simple explanation of our school trial!"

To Be Continued.


	2. Chapter 2

For the most part, they'd watched the trial in silence, not really believing what they were witnessing. But now it was over, and the verdict had been delivered, and, with terrible swiftness, the sentence had been carried out. And now one of them was finally moved to speak, as the image of the battered, nearly unrecognizable form of Kuwata Leon stayed frozen on the screen.

"YES!" Sayaka exulted, fists clenched as she sat in front of the TV and face twisted in a look of unspeakable joy. "Oh, yes, yes, yes! Did it hurt? I bet it hurt, didn't it, you lousy sack of shit! I _hope_ it hurt! I hope it hurt a thousand, no, ten thousand times worse than what you did to me, you fucking son of a bitch! Fuck you fuck you fuck you! You killed me, you fuck! You fucking deserve to fucking die for fucking killing me!"

The exultation was only brief, though, as her excitement clearly aggravated the lingering effects of the weird medical treatment which had saved her life, and she flinched in pain, turning away from the TV in the process to see that Enoshima - no, no, Ikusaba, had to remember that - was staring at her expressionlessly.

"What?" Sayaka snapped.

"Um ... I feel kind of obligated to point out that he did not, in fact, kill you or anything," the model reminded her.

"So what? He still tried to kill me! He thought he was killing me! It's the exact same thing!"

"Is it the same thing as you trying to kill him?" Ikusaba asked, eyebrow raised.

"What? No, of course not, that's completely different! I was just pretending!"

"Sticking with that, huh?"

"It's the truth."

"Whatever," she said, turning back to the TV, which had gone dark in the interim. "Looks like it's over. I wonder if this was a recording or a live broadcast?"

"Who - no, that's actually a good question," Sayaka amended, manic grin starting to come back. "If it was a recording, and we ask really really nicely, whoever's behind this will show it to us again and again and -"

"Uh, that's cool, but what I was wondering was whether there's been enough time since that happened for it to happen again."

Sayaka's grin vanished. "'It'?" she repeated.

"'It'," Ikusaba repeated right back, pointing towards the hallway which led to the dorm rooms and ultimately the 'autopsy room' from which they'd both emerged a short while ago.

Sayaka followed her pointing finger, frowning in confusion.

And then, quite suddenly, she saw what the other girl was talking about. "Oh fuck," she said. "Oh fuck fuck fuck fuck. He's going to be showing up there, isn't he?" She quickly stood up. "I've got to, I've got to - I can't let him do it to me again!" And with that, she dashed towards the doorway.

More slowly, for she was in a bit more pain than the other girl, Ikusaba got to her own feet and followed her, pausing just inside the hallway to note that only two faces were lit up on the nameplates of the doors in the dormitory. Then she headed down the hallway.

In the autopsy room, Sayaka was frantically and somewhat awkwardly pulling open drawers, all of which proved to be empty. "Knives!" she shouted. "What the hell kind of autopsy room doesn't have knives for the medical examiner! This is a lousy autopsy room! Ah!" On impulse, she yanked one of the drawers right out of the counter, since it was only a slider rather than being fixed in there. Then she managed to lift it up and hold it above her head. "When he shows up, you hold him down and I'll bash his head in with this!" she told Ikusaba.

"... ohhh-kay," Ikusaba said, and ambled over to the cubbyhole.

They stood there for quite a while, waiting for it to open.

"What's taking so long?" Sayaka asked, her good arm trembling under the weight of the drawer.

"I dunno," Ikusaba replied.

"Maybe there's some sort of a hold-up," suggested Monobear, who was standing between them, watching the cubbyhole with apparent interest.

Blessed silence reigned for a few moments after the declaration made by the small two-toned bear.

Then it broke.

"EYAAAAAAAAAHHH!" Sayaka shrieked as she turned to look at him, the drawer trembling in her hand.

Ikusaba's own hands streaked out to hold it in place. "Don't!" the other girl snapped. "That's what got me into this mess!"

"But - but - but -" Sayaka stammered.

"Sorry to interrupt," Monobear interjected, manifestly not sorry. "I just came out here to clarify a few things. But you should really thank Junko-chan for stopping you, because - hm! Actually, you know what? Since you're no longer students at Despair Academy, it's not technically against the rules for you to attack the headmaster of Despair Academy! So you'd have gotten a free pass if you did that, _this time_. Ah well. Can't be helped." The bear produced a phoney-looking flower from somewhere and sniffed it with an obviously affected air of melancholy.

"S-she told me who she really is," Sayaka stammered.

"How interesting. Anyway, on to clarification. I really only just stepped in because the suspense was becoming -"

"Unbearable?" Ikusaba interjected.

The bear was silent. "Ahem. I was going to say something else. Anyway. Clarification - people who are executed following a school trial will not return from the dead. Their injuries are too great to be repaired. So, no need to fret about any reunions with the person who killed you. Boy, that would be really -"

"Em-bear-assing?"

"I. Was. Going. To. Say. Something. Else."

"Oh," Sayaka said, losing her grip on the drawer, and dropping it into Ikusaba's hands, while almost collapsing in on herself. "Oh, that's so good to hear. Thank you, I - thank you," she said to Monobear.

"Aw, no need to thank me," he replied dismissively. "What am I saying? You can thank me all you want! But no, thank me by becoming productive members of the workforce!"

Silence reigned again.

"Sorry, what was that?" Ikusaba asked.

"Well, gee, Junko-chan, you little delinquent, the two of you have dropped out of school, after all, so you wouldn't expect your parents to go on supporting you after you've shamed them like that, assuming that they're alive which you probably shouldn't? Nope, time to get a job, yessir. And happily, there's one lined up for both of you! Be sure and do good at it! Otherwise you'll end up fired and you know what they say - if you don't work, you don't eat!"

"What - what - what - what are you talking about?" Sayaka finally cried.

"You'll see," the bear said cheerfully. "Oh, and incidentally - attacking your employer is a good way to get fired. You could call that a new rule if you like. Well, I'll give you two time to settle into your new rooms before we get down to work. Aren't I just the best boss ever? Later!" And with that, the bear dashed through the door and vanished from sight.

After a few seconds of paralyzed confusion, Sayaka dashed after the bear, leaving Ikusaba holding the drawer. Because of her injuries and because of the need to put the drawer back into its place, the other girl was a bit slower to follow ... though of course, she was also in no particular hurry because she knew quite well that Sayaka wasn't going to catch him.

Indeed, as she finally exited the autopsy room, she met Sayaka coming back the other way with a frustrated and confused look on her face. "Where did he go?!" the idol demanded.

"I dunno," Ikusaba lied, deliberately not glancing at the air ducts in the walls of the hallway. They were out of reach and - like most real air ducts - far too small for a human being to crawl around in, but neither would be a problem for a small bear-shaped robot.

"What did he mean by 'productive member of the workforce'?" Sayaka demanded.

"I dunno," Ikusaba lied again, then mixed things up by throwing in some red herring. "Maybe we're gonna be janitors?"

"How the hell can we be janitors?" Sayaka whined.

"We're three for three on 'I dunno'," Ikusaba informed her cheerfully. "My turn. Why do you keep asking me questions you know I won't be able to answer?"

Tempting though it was for Sayaka to sneer out 'I dunno' in response, she ground her teeth and instead replied, "Forgive me, dear lady, for thinking that someone, who used to work for the bastard behind all of this, might possibly have greater insight into what is going on here than I myself. Please, please forgive me."

Ikusaba coughed. "Okay, first of all, don't ever do that 'forgive me' thing again. It _really_ reminds me of one of my sister's more annoying friends. Well, that's not fair. My sister doesn't have any friends who aren't annoying, so it doesn't really particularize it enough. But you already remind me a lot of her, and I don't really need that right now. Secondly, like I told you, I was only working for the mastermind because I was worried about my sister. I don't know where my sister is right now," she continued, telling the absolute truth, before she started lying again. "So I'm not working for the mastermind right now, either. And even if I was, I wouldn't know anything about anything that's going to happen."

Slight hesitation, then she volunteered some information. "But I think I maybe did notice something you haven't."

"What?" Sayaka asked rudely.

"Well, while you were jilling yourself off over what happened to Leon -"

"I was not!" Sayaka protested reflexively. "I don't even know what that means!"

"It means masturbation, possibly not literally. Anyway," Ikusaba continued, to forestall Sayaka's renewed protest, "while you were enjoying yourself at his expense, I was looking around, and I saw something. Actually, it's more like I didn't see something. So I guess actually it's more like I didn't notice something that you ... also didn't, but understood -"

"What did you -" Sayaka started to ask, paused, shook her head, cleared her throat, then continued, sweetly. "And what was it?"

"A kitchen. There isn't one. No convenient kitchen. No mysteriously replenished food supplies. Nothing like that."

Sayaka considered. "Those who don't work ..." she said.

"... don't eat," Ikusaba finished, nodding.

"If we don't do what he says, he'll just let us ... starve to death."

"And while you could lose a few pounds -"

"HEY!"

"- it doesn't sound like a lot of fun. I'm just saying."

On that note, they parted company, silently walking into the rooms with their respective images.

Sayaka couldn't be completely sure, but she thought that the room that she was assigned was quite a bit smaller than the one she'd been living in up in the school. The bed was certainly smaller, really not much more than a cot. And the en suite looked ... but even looking at the door to the washroom made her go panicky again, so she decided to delay investigating its size until later.

She had the feeling that there was going to be an awful lot of later.

To distract herself from that, and from the gnawing in her stomach provoked by all that talk about food and her supposed need to lose a few pounds - lies, all of it, lies, lies, lies - she wandered over to the small closet and swung its doors open. Then slid them closed again, when she realized that it contained several exact copies of the outfit she'd been wearing on the first day, just like the closet back in the other room had. The mastermind had a very strange sense of humor, if he thought it was funny to put them all in the exact same clothes, day in and day out, even after they'd 'died'. She slid the door open again, to confirm that the closet contained a small set of dresser drawers, presumably themselves containing underwear and socks, then slid it shut again because she had no wish to see whether they were identical to the ones she'd been wearing when she came in.

Then she slid it open again, then slid it shut again, because why not? She didn't have anything better to do, so why not keep doing it? So she slid it open again, then slid it shut again, because it was starting to become fun. So she slid it open again, then slid it shut again, and the appeal was honestly wearing a little thin at this point. So she slid it open again, then slid it shut again, because it was still sort of fun, really, even if the thrill was clearly gone, and really it was just work work work at this point.

Then one more time, for luck, because if anyone could use some luck, it was certainly her at this point.

After a while, she found herself wishing that she had a watch. She wondered how long, exactly, she'd been standing there sliding the closet door open and shut. Had it been a long time? Or a short one. A glance at the bed confirmed that it had no bedside table, much less a clock. There hadn't been any clocks up there, either, she thought. At least not ones that worked. And none of them had had watches, and the weird little tablets that Monobear had handed out hadn't had a time display on them.

And no sun, so really, the only way that they'd had of measuring the passage of time had been those announcements Monobear had made about how it was time to go to bed or time to wake up, and who knew if he'd been telling the truth about what time it was. Had they really been in there for four days? What if these people pumped in the same sort of sleeping gas that had gotten them all on the first day while they were already in bed, so that there were actually longer intervals between days? What if the time between 'go to bed' and 'wake up' kept getting shorter, so as to create a much shorter day?

Why was she thinking about all this stuff?

Oh. That's right. To stop herself from thinking about all the other stuff. Yeah, she didn't want to think about any of that. She didn't really want to think at all, right now. So she found herself ambling over to the bed and flopping down face first on to it. It stank of dust. That was safe to think about. How much everything had just been waiting for all of this, how they were all just pawns in a game someone was playing. Much safer territory. Not at all damaging to the ego.

Her destiny was getting farther and farther away from her with every moment she was down here.

Nothing was safe, was it?

The sound of bells ringing roused Sayaka from whatever fugue state she'd entered, and she turned her head as Monobear's voice piped through the room. "All righty, it's time to begin a day of productive work! All employees will please gather immediately in the employee lounge!"

"Immediately, huh?" Sayaka said to herself as she pushed up off the bed. That didn't leave her much time - really, no time at all - to change out of the gown she'd been wearing since she woke up. Doubtless she was going to get a lecture about showing up to work in inappropriate clothes. Oh well. Couldn't be helped, and all that.

She walked out into the hallway and promptly encountered Ikusaba waiting for her, fully dressed in her original outfit, complete with high-heeled boots and even that silly rabbit hair dec of hers. Well, not quite the original outfit - this one was unbuttoned enough to show off more cleavage.

"Didn't like the outfits provided?" the other girl asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Took a nap instead of getting changed," Sayaka lied. Well, she might not be lying. She could possibly have passed out.

Ikusaba shrugged in response as the two of them headed into the lounge. The television screen was already lit up when they arrived, with Monobear's head and shoulders prominently displayed. "Ah, good, good," the bear declared. "I was concerned that I might have to show up and drag one or the other of you out of bed or the shower. I'd be really annoyed if that happened, it could really get violent, and I'm sure we'd all prefer it if things didn't get that -"

"Grizzly?" Ikusaba supplied.

"I wasn't going to say thaaaaat!" the bear roared, waving its tiny arms above its head.

"Please, please, just stop taunting him," Sayaka said wearily, as she sat down on the couch in front of the TV. "And those puns aren't funny, no matter who does them."

Ikusaba shrugged.

"Moving onward," Monobear growled. "Are you ready to get to work?"

"Do we have an alternative that doesn't involve starving to death?" the model asked.

"Of course you do," Monobear promptly replied. "There's drowning yourselves, hanging yourselves with the bedsheets -"

"Or other forms of suicide?" Sayaka asked.

Monobear ignored her, clearly warming to the subject. "- slamming the door closed on your head, breaking the television and using its glass to cut your wrists ... oh so many different alternatives! Moving forward, though ... are you ready to get work? Or what?"

The two girls exchanged a glance. "What do you want us to do?" Ikusaba asked.

"Fuck," replied Monobear.

Silence descended. "Sorry?" Ikusaba said.

"Apology accepted, just don't steal my lines again."

"... no, I wasn't ... that was ... why did you just say 'fuck'?" Ikusaba continued. "Were you upset about us not choosing to -"

"No, I was answering your question. That's what you do in your new job, as Adult Video performers. You fuck." A beat. "Okay, that was clearly unclear, again. I _could_ have been calling you a mean name, then, but I wasn't, I was stating what your job activity will be."

"Adult Video performers?" Sayaka gasped.

"Sometimes abbreviated as AV, but I don't see any reason to do that right now," Monobear agreed. "Now that we've got that straightened out -"

"Nothing is straightened out!" Sayaka shouted, getting up from the couch. "What do you mean, you want us to be AV performers? What ... you ... who _are_ you?"

Monobear's hands came up to cover its mouth. "Eh?" the bear gasped. "What-what-whatever do you mean? What was giving you the impression that I was someone other than Monobear, Headmaster of Despair Academy and now your post-drop-out employer?"

"You gave me that impression!" she said, pointing at him. "You did! Before, when we were in school, you were freaking out at the idea of there being any sort of, of, of _that_ going on between any of us, but now you're wanting us to make pornography? That's completely -"

"Ohhhhhh," Monobear interjected, sighing in relief. "That. Well. That's easily explained! You see, there's this thing that they call persona. Have you ever heard about persona? There's a whole line of video games that are all about it, they're kind of ridiculous, honestly, but because of them the concept has become well-known in you bastards' age group. See, while I'm acting as the Headmaster of Despair Academy, it's important for me to set a good moral example for you bastards, so I adopt a prudish persona. But since you've dropped out, it's not as important, so I adopt a different persona to deal with you, and don't have to be so prudish. I can be way more concerned with practicality and money, like this!"

"That's - wait, money?" Sayaka asked.

"Of course money! Makes the world go 'round, you know! This whole situation is being recorded, you see, and I'm going to sell edited excerpts to jaded hedonists across the world! It'll make a bundle! It better, that's how I'm financing the whole deal!"

Sayaka found herself speechless.

"What?" Monobear said at last. "It's not like any of you bastards are paying tuition! Look, just get on with the getting it on, already!"

"Could we have some privacy?" Ikusaba finally asked, having been silent all the way through this discussion.

"Absolutely not, that would defeat the whole purpose of the exercise!"

"... could we have the illusion of privacy?" she asked.

"Oh, well, if that's what you want -" The screen went blank.

"Are you a virgin?" Ikusaba asked bluntly.

"... what?" Sayaka squeaked.

"So that's a no?"

"Of course that's not a no!" she shouted. "What in the world are you -"

"Well, it's just that you're an idol, you know, and I assumed that someone, an agent, a manager, a director, a photographer, someone like that, would have taken care of it by this point, while you all the while presented an appearance of maidenly innocence to the public who demand that sort of thing of their idols, all the while hoping that each of them would be the one to deflower them, hypocritical jerks that they are."

After Sayaka took a moment to absorb that, she shook her head frantically. "No!" she lied. "Nothing like that has ever happened. Maybe that sort of thing happens when you're a model, but I -"

"I wouldn't know what happens when you're a model," Ikusaba interjected. "That was my sister's gig, not mine."

"What was your 'gig', then?" Sayaka asked angrily.

"Some other time, maybe I'll tell you. Right now, all you need to know is ... yeah, that stopped being an issue a while ago. And if this is the only way we're going to get any food, then -" The other girl shrugged. "I'm getting kinda hungry, you know?"

She considered claiming otherwise, but was interrupted by a stabbing pain in her stomach which gave her the lie.

"You too, huh?"

"... fine," Sayaka sighed, then raised her voice. "All right, we'll do it," she announced. "Send in the guys."

"... what guys?" Ikusaba asked, eyebrow raised.

"What do you mean, what guys, if we're going to do porn, then we need to have ... guys ... ohhhh." An alternative possibility abruptly suggested itself in her mind as Ikusaba began to unbutton her shirt the rest of the way.

"Wait," she said, staring in disbelief as Ikusaba's bra came into view. "Wait-wait-wait. Are you suggesting that he, he wants us to ... with each other?" As is to emphasize this, Sayaka pointed from herself to the other girl with her uninjured hand. "How's that even supposed to work?"

Finishing unbuttoning her shirt, the other girl looked at her archly, and said, in a mock-seductive tone, "My dear, let me _show_ you!"

"Gah!" Sayaka said, backing away from the couch until she hit one of the room's other chairs and flopping down into it.

"... I bet my line makes it into the final cut and yours doesn't," Ikusaba said a bit more normally.

"Who cares about the final cut?"

"I do! I do!" Monobear's voice issued from everywhere and nowhere.

"Illusion of privacy, remember?" Ikusaba said to the ceiling.

"I-I-I, ayiiiiiee ..." Sayaka continued, since even this brief digression wasn't enough to settle her nerves. Shaking her head, at least, gave her enough pause to collect her thoughts. "I can't do this, I don't - I've never -"

"Oh come on."

"Why are you saying that in such a skeptical and sarcastic tone?" she asked irritably, rather than whining, because she was definitely not a whiner.

"Look, I know about you and your group, okay? I don't really care for your kind of music - I prefer death metal and punk if you really want to know -"

"I don't."

Ikusaba ignored her. "- and the occasional Sousa march, but - anyway, my point is, I'm familiar with your band's oeuvre whether I want to be or not. And your stage shows always have lots of girl-on-girl flirtation, and half your songs are about the power of love between girlfriends -"

"Chaste, pure, sisterly love, not, not dykey stuff! And that other thing, that's just acting, and -"

Ikusaba stood up. "So _act_ ," she said a bit forcefully, pulling her shirt the rest of the way off, leaving her just clad in her bra, skirt, and boots. "Play to the camera, like I've been doing. Act like your life depends on it, _because it does_."

Sayaka stared up at her. Ikusaba stared right back. The other girl's stare was far more intense, and so Sayaka looked away first. "You've been with girls?" she asked uncomfortably.

"On occasion, yes, there've been multiple girls, in addition to the one-on-one stuff that I prefer. If what you're asking is whether I know what I'm doing, then the answer is I guess implicit in that."

"... then, I guess, you actually are going to have to, uh, show me, because I don't, and anyway, my arm - I wouldn't - who the hell wants to watch injured girls doing stuff with each other, anyway?" she added unhappily, though still not whining.

"Jaded hedonists. Weren't you paying attention earlier?" said Monobear's voice.

"Illusion of privacy!" the two of them yelled at the ceiling.

"Cheeeeee."

"Fine," said Sayaka, sitting back in the chair. "Just ... just get on with it, then."

"Oh, you sweet little flirt," Ikusaba replied in the mock-seductive tone as she walked over to her. Before Sayaka could even start to react to that, the other girl bent over and began kissing her, simply pressing her lips against Sayaka's own at first, then pushing into her mouth with her tongue as their bodies began to draw closer to each other.

It was odd, being kissed by a girl like this. It wasn't as though she'd had many kisses in general, certainly no sloppy kisses by her manager in the privacy of his office back before she'd turned twelve, so she didn't have much basis for comparison. But on the whole, she thought Ikusaba was a pretty good kisser, if maybe a bit too forceful for her liking, particularly the way that the other girl's hands were on her hips -

Wait. What were the other girl's hands doing on her hips?

Oh. They were pushing up the hem of Sayaka's gown. Ohhh. Uh ... this was moving faster than she was really comfortable with, actually, she was really just still getting used to the whole idea of it, and now all of a sudden -

"Mmm," Ikusaba said, as she pulled back from the kiss and glanced down at the suddenly exposed region of Sayaka's crotch. "Shimapan. Naughty naughty."

_Naughty naughty?_ Sayaka thought, too incredulous to repeat the words out loud. She hadn't chosen these panties, so how could anyone call her that for wearing them when she hadn't even seen them herself and -

Abruptly, her thoughts were thrown into disarray by the sensation of being touched down there through the panties; not just touched, but rubbed rather forcefully, as a matter of fact, with the heel of one of the other girl's hands, while the other basically tickled her waist. As one does, she gasped.

"Oh, you like that, huh?" Ikusaba asked, not sounding at all like any managers who had never ever gotten Sayaka alone in their offices and then not done anything at all to her, in Sayaka's utterly honest opinion. "Yeah, you liiiike that. Let's see whether you like something else."

"Whah elll-" Sayaka asked, finding the mental space to be annoyed at the fact that her voice was so distorted by the sensation.

"This else," Ikusaba replied as she reached up with her thumbs to yank the hips of the panties away from Sayaka's own hips, pulling them taut and then slicing them with the surprisingly sharp red thumbnails. The remaining fabric came off quite easily, and Ikusaba cooed. "Ah, what a pretty pretty flower."

Sayaka didn't get that. After all, it wasn't as though she'd spent hours examining herself in a mirror, but she certainly didn't see any resemblance to any flowers worthy of the name. And even if it was, who the heck kissed flowers, like Ikusaba was about to doooooooghhhh.

After a few minutes of, of whatever it was that Ikusaba was doing to her, since Sayaka found it impossible to look down and actually watch for fear that the sight, when added to the sensations and the sounds that she couldn't ignore, was going to drive her coocoo bananas, she felt the sensations stop, and then a feather-light touch on her waist.

"There," the other girl said softly. "That should be enough for the first installment."

"F-f-f-first installment?" Sayaka stammered out, finally looking down then promptly looking back up again when she saw what her secret garden looked like at the moment.

"Uh, yeah?" Ikusaba replied sardonically. "We're going to be doing this every day from now on, remember. Well, maybe not this. I'll probably show you how tribadism works tomorrow, and the next day -"

Sayaka throttled her immediate response, which was of course to demand an explanation of a certain unfamiliar term, and interjected, "Okay, yes, I get it. Um ... you, uh, don't, um, want me to do that, what you did just now, I mean, you don't want me to do that to -"

"Nope," Ikusaba replied flatly. "You'd suck at it."

"... oh."

"Really, bad sex is not better than no sex at all. Maybe once I've shown you how it goes, you might be worth something, but I can cheerfully go without your fumbling attempts at pleasuring me."

"... you could have just left it at 'you'd suck at it', you know," Sayaka bit out unhappily.

"Oh, sorry," Ikusaba said, so perfunctorily it almost made Sayaka's head spin again. "It's just that you sounded like you were kind of oddly keen about -"

"Well, I'm not!" Sayaka snapped closing her legs and doing her level best to ignore the wetness under her.

"Wha'ever."

"Actually, I could still use a bit more footage," Monobear's voice piped in. "But you know, I guess that a masturbation scene with just Junko-chan would be good enough!"

Relieved, profoundly relieved, after the moment of fear, for it had definitely been fear, that she'd felt after Monobear's initial words, Sayaka quickly got up. She didn't even pause to address the weird way that the robot or whatever kept on calling Ikusaba by her cover identity. Nor did she pause to see Ikusaba settle down in the same chair where she'd been sitting, hike up her short skirt to reveal that she was wearing nothing underneath, lick a finger, and then reach down between her own legs. No, she kept her eyes right on the doorway out, never pausing at all.

"You'll find the food you earned in your room, by the way," Monobear's voice added.

And indeed she did, on a tray on the floor in front of the bed, a hamburger and fries wrapped in familiar packaging.

"I'm loving it," Sayaka muttered to herself as she looked at the food ... then ran for the bathroom, barely making it before she threw up whatever was in her stomach.

She'd never been bulimic. (Or anorexic. She worried about her weight, of course, but skeletal girls did not get to appear on stage.) So losing it like this was a novel experience, and Sayaka was coming to the conclusion that novel experiences were to be avoided. Not that it seemed that she was going to have much of a choice in the matter, if Ikusaba's words on the subject were to be believed.

Once her stomach was reasonably settled, she awkwardly got up off the bathroom floor, flushed the toilet, and lurched out into the bedroom. Even looking at the food threatened to bring back the nausea, so she just avoided it for now. It wasn't like the stuff could go bad, given how many preservatives it had in it. Instead, she carefully lay down and spent a while just staring at the ceiling.

Boring experiences weren't really any better than novel ones, she ultimately decided.

There was a knock at the door.

"Gosh," she said, to whomever might be listening. "I wonder who it could possibly be." Awkwardly, she got up again and lurched over to the door.

"'Sup?" asked Ikusaba, mouth half-full of hamburger.

"Ghgll," Sayaka replied, hand coming up to her mouth.

The other girl swallowed before continuing. "Oh, no, don't tell me you're bulimic."

"I'm not bulimic," she growled. "But I did ... look, what do you want?"

"I just came to see if you were all right," Ikusaba answered, taking another bite. "I mean, there's just you and me down here, so we've got to look out for each other, right?"

Sayaka kept herself from rolling her eyes at the cloying sentiment. "Right. Well, I'm not all right, but I guess that I'm as close to all right as I'm going to get until we get out of here."

"Until? Don't you mean if?"

"No, I mean until." What she did not perhaps mean was 'we'.

"Well, I guess that's a good attitude," Ikusaba mused. "How's the arm?"

"Aches a little, but ... I've never had a broken arm, so I don't know how it's supposed to feel," she admitted. "Never even had a sprained ankle before this." That had been what happened to other girls, strictly by coincidence.

"Well, I've never been as cut up as I was, either, but most of the wounds aren't aching much anymore," Ikusaba explained. "I think whatever they did to us is still working, so we might be healing quickly. You can probably have the cast off in a day or so."

"... how are we going to get it off?" Sayaka asked.

"... that's a very good question."

"Greeaaaat."

"Well, look at the bright side. We'll probably only have to do a bit more girl-girl stuff, since there's bound to be a guy getting sent down shortly."

Sayaka stared blankly. "That's the bright side? You think one of our classmates is going to get murdered, and that's the bright side?"

Ikusaba shrugged. "Well, it could be one of the cute ones. Naegi-kun, maybe?"

"You're weird," Sayaka declared. "Good night." And she shut the door.

**To Be Continued**


	3. Chapter 3

Four sleeps later, everything changed again.

Sayaka was getting used to thinking of time in terms of 'sleeps', by now. Her own exhaustion and wakefulness was the only real measure of time's passage that she had. Well, she supposed that eventually she was going to have another one, but she didn't want to think about the possibility that a full month would pass before she got the hell out of here. Not to mention the suspicion that Monobear would somehow incorporate their periods into the porn they were shooting, somehow. There were probably sickos who got off on that, after all, and they were just the sort of jaded hedonists whom the project was likely to hit up for money.

She hadn't talked about that with Ikusaba, though. The two of them didn't really spend a lot of time talking, since, after the first 'day' or so, there hadn't been that much to say. There'd been a little bit of conversation just the previous sleep when Ikusaba had helped her get the cast off her now healed arm, but it'd all been about the immediate situation rather than anything beyond that.

And of course, Ikusaba told her what to do when they were fucking.

She'd gotten used to thinking of what they did like that. It certainly wasn't 'making love' - the thought of loving any girl, much less someone who was as big of a jerk as Ikusaba, made her want to puke - and it couldn't be called 'sex' since that implied procreation for her, so 'fucking' it was. She'd stopped cringing about it after the second day, at least involuntarily - she kept right on doing so deliberately, since that was her persona, the good girl who was being made to do awful things she didn't enjoy.

The viewers were bound to like that.

So far, though, she hadn't really had to do anything, just lie back and take what Ikusaba did to her. Admittedly, that was really varied - lots of stuff shoved up both of her lower holes and moved back and forth in a parody of what a boy's thing was supposed to do. She'd gotten used to the hickies on her breasts from when the other girl went to work on them, and the sensation of another set of lips and a tongue moving around down there as well.

Eventually, though, she knew that Monobear was going to demand that Ikusaba force her to do those sorts of things back to her, and that thought still vaguely disgusted her. But she knew she'd be able to do it - the question was how much of her own disgust was going to come through in her performance. Well, she thought as she lay in bed after waking up and considering all of this, hopefully it won't happen today.

"Ah-ah-hem!" declared Monobear's voice over the loudspeaker. "Attention, all employees! We're about to take on a new recruit, so why not head into the medical room and make the newbie welcome once they arrive!"

And just like that, everything changed.

"Wonder who it's going to be," Ikusaba greeted her when they met in the hallway.

"Don't really care."

"I'm kind of hoping for a boy," the other girl continued as they headed for the medical room.

"Seriously, don't care."

"But another girl might be nice, too."

"I wonder how many ways there are to say I don't care?"

"Probably as many as there are ways to say 'I love you,'" Ikusaba replied speculatively. "But come on, you've got to be at least a little curious as to which one of those people got killed by one of the others."

That finally got Sayaka to look at her. "For all you know, whoever it is could have mouthed off to Monobear like you did," she said with a frown.

"Also a possibility," Ikusaba agreed as they arrived at the medical room doorway. "But I think it's way more likely -"

"And we're back to me not caring."

They waited a few moments, and - just as it had when Ikusaba arrived - the dumbwaiter door slid open, a black body bag shot out of the doorway and onto the table, the door closing almost as soon as it cleared. Almost as soon as the process was over, Sayaka headed over to unzip the bag.

"Oh, yeah, you're so not curious," Ikusaba lightly jeered.

"I just want to get this stupid thing over with," Sayaka replied as she pulled the bag open. "Ah, you're out of luck. It's Fujisaki. Oyy, Fujisakiiii ... wakey wake -"

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!" Chihiro Fujisaki declared, eyes popping open.

"Ow!" Sayaka replied, stumbling back with her hands over her ears. "Okay, next time you open the bag," she growled at the smirking Ikusaba.

"No, no, I still need to study your technique."

"E-e-enoshima-san?" Chihiro stammered. "Mai-maizono-san? What, what -"

"Okay, the good news is, you're not dead," Sayaka told the new arrival. "The bad news is ... well, there's not a lot that's not bad news, really ... wow, what happened to your hands?" she added as Chihiro lifted them up to stare at them.

"I-I-I." After that stammer, Chihiro fell silent for a moment, just staring at the bandages in confusion. "But ... all he did was hit me once."

"Okay, you lucky people, the school trial is about to get started," declared Monobear via the announcer. "You're probably going to have to carry your poor classmate, since the other wounds from the crucifixion are in the feet."

"Crucifixion?" Sayaka asked, jaw dropping.

"But all he did was hit me once," Chihiro repeated.  


* * *

  
"So, which one of them did it?" Sayaka asked Chihiro as they sat together in front of the TV, with Ikusaba leaning over the back of the couch just behind them. At the moment, the participants in the school trial were discussing the murder weapon.

Chihiro swallowed, then raised a tremulous hand to point at Mondo's image when the camera angle came around to focus on the motorcycle gang-leader. "It was him. He ... we were talking, and then, all of a sudden, he hit me with -"

"You've got that wrong!" Naegi said on the screen. "I think the weapon that gave the killing blow was the dumbbell found in the scene of the crime. That dumbbell had some blood stuck to it, and there was nothing else that could serve as a weapon in the room."

"In addition, the wound on the victim's head fits perfectly to the shape of the dumbbell," Kirigiri (on the screen) quietly offered.

"This is so very very strange," Chihiro (in the living room) mused, bringing a hand up to the aforementioned wound, now covered with bandages.

"Look on the bright side," Sayaka said, far more gently than she'd been talking lately. "You're probably going to get to see that asshole get -"

Before words like 'his just desserts' could be uttered, Chihiro turned rapidly to look at her, clearly even more upset than she'd been at the start of all this. "Don't call him names like that!"

Sayaka stared. "'Don't call him names like that?'" she repeated. "He killed you! What the hell is wrong with you?"

"Well, I mean ..." the other trailed off into hems and haws for a moment, before blinking repeatedly. "No. No, he didn't. I'm, I'm still alive. So ... he didn't kill me. And -"

"He pretty clearly meant to do it -" Sayaka started to interject angrily.

"Oh, no," Ikusaba groaned. "Not this again. Please, anything but this again."

"The culprit who killed Chihiro Fujisaki is ... the serial murderer Genocide Joe!" Togami Byakuya declared (on screen).

Sayaka and Chihiro turned to stare at the screen. "Say what?" they chorused.

"Okay, this is more like it," Ikusaba mused agreeably.

A rather lengthy digression on serial murderers, dissociative personality disorder, motive means and opportunity, decorative choices for change rooms, and student IDs and the impossibility of hacking them ensued, while the three in the room watched in stunned silence. (Well, silence, at least.) When at last Monobear agreed to a brief recess for the school trial, and their former classmates returned to the scene of the crime, they found themselves being treated to a unique experience.

"This is so very very very strange," Chihiro repeated and amplified as the camera angle presented a pretty clear glimpse of Chihiro's own "corpse".

"I guess that settles the question of whether or not these are recordings," Sayaka mused.

"Well, it settles the question of whether this one's a recording," Ikusaba pointed out. "We still don't know -"

"Oh no," Chihiro said, going pale as (on the screen) Kirigiri asked for the victim's body to be examined closely.

"What?" Sayaka asked.

"Um ... w-well, you see ... I should p-probably -"

"GAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!?" shrieked Sakura (on the screen.)

"Huh?" Sayaka asked.

"She is ... she is ... male!" Sakura proclaimed (on the screen.)

"Um ... okay, this is going to take a bit of explanation," Chihiro said as Ikusaba and Sayaka slowly turned to look at him.

"You're a _guy_?" Sayaka said incredulously.

"Oh, I see, she was a boy," said Yamada (on screen).

"Yes," Chihiro admitted. "I'm male, biologically, and, well, I guess that I'm -"

"EEEEEHHHHH?" said Yamada (on screen).

" _You're_ a guy?" Sayaka repeated, tone more or less unchanged except for the emphasis.

"... that's sort of a hurtful way of asking, but -"

"He's a guy!" Sayaka declared, somewhat emphatically, to Ikusaba, who was watching all this with interest.

"Are you sure?" Ikusaba asked, as the on-screen freakout over this development continued. "Maybe we ought to check, see for ourselves?"

"Excuse me?" Chihiro yelped, hands reaching down to clench the hem of the dressing gown he was wearing, as if to hold it firmly in place.

Sayaka made a face. "Don't be more annoying than usual, that's going to come later whether we like it or not," she said irritably.

"... what exactly do you mean by that?" Chihiro asked, starting to go a bit pale.

"Eh, she's right, it'll all be made way too clear for your liking later," Ikusaba agreed with a weary toss of her twin-tailed hair. "For now, what's your deal? Dead sister, parents couldn't cope so you started pretending to be her?"

"What? No. That's ridiculous. I just ... well, I just like dressing like this. Or rather like tha - oh. They've moved back to the courtroom, now. I wonder when my body was moved from ... anyway, I know it's a little bit strange, but my dad told me that it's okay." He shrugged.

"Is your dad single?" Sayaka asked abruptly.

"... uh, yes?"

"Figures. Actually, it all figures," she grumbled, looking away from the boy sitting between her and Ikusaba to look at the TV, where Celestia Ludenberg was patiently discussing the last conversation she'd had with said boy. "After all that, we finally get a guy down here ... so of course, the guy we get is the faggot."

"Hey!" Chihiro shouted, showing more animation than he had since his awakening.

"Hey," Ikusaba said as well, a bit more quietly, but frowning all the same. "Not cool, Sayaka. You shouldn't call people names like that. There's nothing wrong with being gay."

"Yes, except no!" Chihiro simultaneously agreed and contradicted. "I'm not gay, I just like dressing in women's clothing and -"

"- get defensive about the guy who killed you when you were both in the boy's changing room," Sayaka interjected, rolling her eyes. "And I don't know where you get off telling me not to call people names, after all the names you've called me this last little while," she added to Ikusaba.

"Good point," Ikusaba said agreeably. "The one about me, not about you," she explained, as Chihiro turned to look at her.

"I'm telling you -"

"Tell me whatever you like, I don't have any obligation to listen," Sayaka said, waving a hand in front of Chihiro's face. "Whatever. I think this farce is winding down."

"... when Celes-san told her story earlier, she didn't say anything about the jersey's color. So how did you know that the jersey Fujisaki-san wore was blue?" Naegi asked Owada (on screen).

"Oh, seriously?" Sayaka groaned. "The killer accidentally reveals in testimony something only the killer would know? That's what it hinges on?"

There followed a series of spluttering denials, the revelation that the circuitry on the computerized ID cards would break down at high temperatures, and the ultimate admission by Owada of his guilt, and the consequent vote to convict him.

"Oh, no, no, no," Chihiro groaned when he saw the predictable result.

"You seriously wanted him to get away with it?" Ikusaba asked, gaping a bit. "Sweetie, you're starting to eliminate my doubts about whether Maizono's right about you."

"No!" he snapped. "I didn't, I don't, but - this must be so sad for Ishimaru-san. They'd finally made friends with each other, and -" He broke off as Monobear began to tell the sad story of the youth of Chihiro Fujisaki, and how it had led him to this pass.

"That isn't even remotely what happened!" Chihiro yelped. "Okay, yes, I was bullied a lot, and people called me weak, but how does it make sense for that to make me want to be a girl? Girls aren't weak! Look at Ogami-san, for goodness' sake! This is a grotesque simplification of my life choices!"

"Nobody gives a crap about your life choices," Sayaka told him.

"Why are you being so mean?"

The narrative by Monobear of the life and horrible mistakes of Mondo Owada distracted them both, however, from that discussion.

"So that's it?" Chihiro asked dizzily. "He, he thought I was pressing him to know what his secret was? No! I didn't care what your secret was, Owada-kun!" he yelled at the TV. "I just wanted to get strong like you -"

"You realize he's dead, now, right?" Ikusaba asked.

Whatever Chihiro might have said in response to this was lost, for at that moment, the punishment began, and Chihiro watched, horrified, as Owada was dragged away from the courtroom, attached to a motorcycle, and - through a method too bizarre and disturbing to be described, reduced to his essential oils ... which were then used by Monobear as a pancake topping.

"Ngah," he said when it was over.

"Okay, that was kind of gross," Sayaka agreed reluctantly.

" _Kind of?_ " Chihiro shrieked. "Nobody deserves that, no matter what they did! _And he didn't even **do** it!_ " His anger and grief kept him upright for a brief interval, and then he collapsed in on himself, choking and gagging.  


* * *

  
Several moments later, Sayoko was feeling even more disgusted than usual as she held Chihiro's head over the toilet in the en suite of the room now identified with a "cute" little Chihiro icon. She supposed that she ought to feel some vague sympathy for the boy, since this had been her, not that long ago, but she reminded herself that she hadn't lost it over what had happened to the person who'd put her down here. And anyway, she was annoyed at having to do this for someone.

At least Ikusaba had helped her to carry the crippled boy in here, before Monobear had appeared on-screen in the living room and started calling for "Junko-chan", whereupon Ikusaba had left her to answer the 'landlord's' call. That probably contributed a bit to her annoyance, actually.

Well, the retching and the dripping noises had stopped for a while now. "Are you done puking?" she asked.

"I think so," Chihiro replied faintly, his voice amplified a bit by the toilet bowl.

With a grunt, Sayoko helped him to sit upright, against the en suite wall. He looked up at her, and finally spoke. "Why?"

"Why what?" she asked right back at him.

"Why are you helping me when you hate me so much?" he expanded.

"I don't hate you," she snapped. It sounded unconvincing even to herself, but she pressed on regardless. "I'm just annoyed with this whole situation, which includes the fact that there's nobody else around to help you, so I have to do it. Believe me, you're going to be just as disgusted with the whole situation as I am in no time at all."

"Maybe you're right," Chihiro said, looking down. "I'm sorry for being such a burden."

"Whatever," she said, grunting as she picked him up, human crutch style. "The good news is that those injuries should heal pretty quick, just like ours did." She frowned, then, as something odd about that statement occurred to her. She couldn't quite put her finger on what was bothering her, though, so she just frowned as she carried him out of the bathroom, then out of the undecorated room (no different from her own) and then into the hallway and the living room.

"Welcome back!" said Monobear's image on the screen. "Did you have fun reviewing inputs?"

Chihiro didn't answer as Sayaka carried him over to the couch where Ikusaba was still sitting.

"Okay, be like that, then," the bearbot said with a shrug. "Anyway, I was just explaining to Junko-chan -"

"Seriously, why do you keep doing that?" Sayaka interrupted, turning to glare at the TV. "We know she's not really Junko, you know that we know it, so why do you keep calling her that?"

The bear proceeded to flip out. "Whywhywhywhywhywhywhywhy?" it shouted. "Honestly, you're as bad as those bastards upstairs with their meaningmeaningmeaningmeaningmeaningmeaning! I do things because I do things because I do things because I do things because! Are you satisfied with that explanation?"

Sayaka opened her mouth.

"Tough!"

She closed it again.

"Ahem. Now, as I was just saying, I was explaining to Junko-chan -" Here the bear paused, as though to give Sayaka the chance to object, which she obviously didn't take. "- that with Chihiro-chan's arrival, there's going to be a few changes in how we do the things we do down here."

"What things?" Chihiro asked.

"Obviously, I'm talking about the porn that you bastards make. Didn't they explain that to you? They had plenty of opportunities. How remiss of you two," the bear said, looking down in shame. "Right, so, basically, up until now it's been the two of you, and that's been great, but now there are three ... and so it's been decided that if any of you don't work, then none of you eat."

"What?" Sayaka snapped. "That's not fair!"

"Of course it's not fair. I'm a bear," Monobear 'explained'. "Anyway, get on with the getting of it on. I'll leave you to it." And with that, the screen went blank.

"He - he's not serious," Chihiro stammered.

"Yeah, he is," Ikusaba answered.

"See what I mean about the whole situation?" Sayaka sneered, as she started to pull off her gown.

"Y-you can't be serious," Chihiro stammered as Sayaka pulled the smock up to her neck, exposing her bra and panties, and started working her head through its neck hole. "You can't possibly -"

"Were you just in some sort of fugue state when Monobear told us that if any of us didn't work, then none of us would eat?" she asked, with the neck hole just over her nose. Her eyes came into view, glaring scornfully at him, a moment later. "Now I suspect that you probably couldn't keep something down regardless, but some of us aren't bulimic! Hey, Junko-chan? Could you help out a little?"

"Eh, I guess so," Ikusaba replied ambivalently, then reached down to yank the hem of Chihiro's gown out of his crippled hand, yanking it up to expose the startling absence of any briefs, and a tiny unit which showed no signs of erection. With her other hand, she held him in place on the couch so that he couldn't wiggle away. (Getting up and walking was of course not an option, owing to his feet.)

"But - hey, no! - but I don't want to lose my virginity this way!" the crossdressing boy protested.

"And I'm not all that keen on giving you mine, either, but -" Sayaka said wearily as she knelt down in front of the couch and began half-crawling over to him.

"Wait wait wait," said Ikusaba. "You know that by this time everyone's going to have seen us going at it, and me shoving enough stuff up you to pop a whole school's worth of cherries, right? What's the deal with -"

Sayaka let out an annoyed sigh. "Don't you know anything about movie-making? Editing, dumbass! We can put it together so that this scene comes before that one, just like we can take dumb revealing lines like that out!"

Ikusaba blinked. "Huh. Good point. Okay, fake being a tsundere virgin all you like."

"Gee, thanks. Ahem. And I'm not all that keen on giving you mine, either, but that's show biz, baby," she said, delivering the line exactly as she had been before Ikusaba's interruption. And without further ado, she swooped down to take the penis in her mouth. _Yech,_ she thought. _Well, he was a catatonic 'corpse' not all that long ago, so I suppose it figures that there would have been some release of fluids, but still, blech! At least this shouldn't take terribly long._

And indeed, it didn't take very long at all for the organ to have gotten as big as it was going to get, slightly longer than someone's middle finger but rather wider. Sayaka briefly considered taking him the rest of the way to orgasm with her mouth, but she supposed that, having said that she was about to give him her virginity, she might as well go the rest of the way. So she pulled back, tapped her cheek with it while smiling sweetly up at him, and briefly deigned to pay attention to what he was saying.

"- no, please, stop! I don't want this! It's wrong! Please, please, stop doing what you are doing and -"

Yes, as she'd thought, he wasn't saying anything important. Nor familiar to her, nor anything she'd heard her own voice saying at any time in the past. Nope.

She stood up and pulled her panty's crotch to the side, then grabbed the unit with one hand to hold it steady while she slid it up into her. "Welcome to adulthood!" she cried into the sudden silence that followed.

"AHHHHHHHH!" Chihiro replied, doubtless thrilled to be initiated by someone as famous and beautiful as Sayaka. Well, okay, even she couldn't convince herself of that. Which was irritating, and when she got irritated, well -

"Awwww, what's the matter, sweet thing?" she asked, raising her voice as she rode him, up and down, up and down. "Oh, let me guess, you wanted it to be Owada-kun who took your cherry, didn't you? You wanted him to pump a big load of strength right up your innocent maidenly ass!"

"N-no, I'm not, I don't - stop! Just stop!"

"I'm not gonna stop!" Sayaka nearly shrieked. "You fucking turd, you thought you were weak? Well this is what happens to the weak when someone strong wants some! So you're gonna take it, you goddamn fairy! Fucking take it like a man!"

"Augh!" Chihiro rebutted as Ikusaba proceeded to sit on his face.

"I don't think there's really any point in listening to him, do you?" she said, unbuttoning her vest to let her braless breasts tumble out.

"Not really," Sayaka hissed. "Good solution. When I get him off, what say we switch so I can feed him some of what he wanted to taste so fucking badly?"

"Oh, I love the way you think!" Ikusaba crowed, grinning broadly, then leaned forward, lips pursed.

_Eh, it's just for show,_ Sayaka decided, and bent forward to kiss her.  


* * *

  
Eventually - after Monobear's image popped up to inform them that they had enough footage, and after they'd kept going for a little while longer for the heck of it - they wound down, and helped the now nearly-catatonic Chihiro to his room, then headed to their own rooms to clean up and, of course, eat the meals that had been deposited there. As she chewed into the chicken nuggets supplied today, Sayaka found herself musing that one of them would probably have to help Chihiro eat until his hands healed. He probably wouldn't appreciate it very much, but since Monobear would probably invent some new rule to punish them if they let him die, they didn't really have any other option.

And then, quite suddenly, her head jerked up as a piece of a puzzle fell into place. Setting down her nuggets, she got up and quickly headed out of the room, going over to Ikusaba's and knocking rapidly on the door.

A few moments later, the door opened and Ikusaba, wearing a long towel wrapped around her chest and another one on her head, opened the door. "Yyyyyyyes?" she asked.

"The TV," Sayaka snapped.

"Wha'bout it?"

"You were fiddling around with it before. Is it attached to some sort of DVR or something?"

"Yeah, but if you're hoping to get caught up on your favorite soap opera, I'm sorry to disappoint you -"

"It doesn't have it, no cable connection, yes, I get it, not the point! Does it have recordings of the trials we've been shown?" she demanded.

Ikusaba tilted her head to the side. "Yeah, I guess that could be what those are. Mostly it's for footage from the various cameras that were recording us, but - you're not listening to me, are you?" she asked empty space.

Garbed in a bathrobe, she followed Sayaka's assumed course to the living room a few moments later, where she found her in front of the TV fiddling with the buttons at its base. "Soooo," she said, when Sayaka didn't even bother to look up at her. "Planning on jilling off over what happened to Leon some more?"

"Don't be coarser than you have to be," Sayaka said without any heat as she stared at the screen, revealing a display of recorded programs that she was cycling through. "Where is it, where is it, where the fuck is it already, AH!" And with that exhalation, the screen changed to show the start of the most recently shown school trial. She promptly started fast-forwarding until it reached the recess where they'd gone to the changing room, then paused it.

"I was right," she said, after a moment.

"Good for you!" Ikusaba said cheerfully. "What were you right about, again?"

Now, she turned to look back at her. "Look at his body, hanging there. He's crucified, yes, but that just means that he was tied up like that. He wasn't nailed to anything. There weren't any wounds to his hands or feet. But there are, now."

"Huh. You're right," Ikusaba said, frowning.

"But why?" Sayaka asked. "Why do that to him? This ... this is a puzzle. Monobear loves puzzles and mysteries and games. If we can figure this out ..." She trailed off, shook her head. "It's crazy, but I think that if we can just figure this out, we'll be closer to getting out of here."

"You really hope that we're going to get out of here, huh?" Ikusaba asked, quietly.

"Hope ... no," Sayaka said, standing up and turning to stare at her full on. "Hope is for suckers. Hope is for _victims_. I am going to get out of here. I am going to go back to being a star again. I don't hope these things are true. I'm going to make them true."

She saw a look of confusion cross Ikusaba's face, and quickly added, "I mean we, of course."

"Oh, yeah, of course," she said, taking a step back.

**To Be Continued.**


	4. Chapter 4

It occurred to Sayaka, as she gazed at the pair of unopened, decorated bags set down outside Chihiro's door, that there was actually another way of measuring the time that had passed since their arrival down here - 'meals', rather than 'sleeps'. Using that metric might even be more accurate than the other. She'd slept four times since Chihiro's arrival, but had only eaten three meals. Which meant, it seemed, that she was two up on Chihiro.

_Not good,_ she thought, and headed over to the door and knocked on it. "It's me, open up."

"It's not locked," declared a faint voice from the other side.

Her frown got deeper as she checked and found that, in fact, the door was not locked. Weird. She always locked her own door, and ... well, best not to dwell on that. She opened the door and peered in.

Chihiro was lying on the bed, facing away from the doorway. Just like Ikusaba, he was dressed in a uniform like the ones he'd worn before. He didn't react visibly to Sayaka's intrusion, nor did he speak up. He just lay there, gazing at the far wall.

"You didn't eat again," Sayaka said. There was no point in small talk, was there?

"I'm not hungry," Chihiro replied, still not looking up.

"Oh, bullshit," Sayaka countered wearily. "If you haven't eaten in two days -" _Or whatever._ "- then yeah, you're hungry. What's the matter, you still need someone to help you eat, after all?"

His wounds had had healed very quickly, and, three sleeps ago, he'd declared that he didn't need any more help eating as he stumbled away from the living room after their shooting session that day. After the next sleep had been the first time she'd seen a bag outside his door.

"No, I'm just not hungry," Chihiro repeated, a little louder.

"And again, that's garbage," Sayaka said, finally stepping the rest of the way inside the room. "Look, if you end up committing suicide by starving yourself, that's probably not going to reflect well on the rest of us."

That got a bit of animation out of him. "Oh well, then," he said, lifting his head to glare at her. "If it's not going to reflect well on you, then I guess I'd better do something about it!"

Despite everything, she flinched at the venom in his tone. "Okay, I get it, you're mad at us."

"What an interesting way of putting it. 'Mad at us'. The funny thing is, I'm not actually mad at you as a group. I can get why Ikusaba does these things. I want to get back to my father, just like she wants to rescue her sister. And I can understand why someone would do pretty much anything to rescue their family. So I'm not mad at her, really. But you?" He rolled onto his back, and, slowly, sat up so that he could full on stare at her. "You're doing it so you can go back to being famous. In the name of doing that, you've become not only a murderer, but a rapist."

"I am not a murderer!" Sayaka protested angrily. "And - fuck you, I came here because I was worried about you, and you start throwing crap like that at me?"

"Whatever," Chihiro replied, collapsing once again. "It's not like it's really a problem if I don't eat. All that will happen is that I'll be weak. Weakweakweakweakweakweakweakweakweak!" he chanted in a parody of his 'motive video'. "And since you're the one who showed me what happens to the weak when someone strong wants something ..." He trailed off, turning to look away.

She opened her mouth to say something. She wasn't really sure what she was going to say, really. And it turned out not to matter, since it was forever lost when the intercom crackled to life.

"Ah-ah-hem!" declared Monobear's voice over the loudspeaker. "Attention, all employees! We're about to take on a new recruit, so why not head into the medical room and make the newbie welcome once they arrive!"

Sayaka started. Those had been the exact words Monobear had used to announce Chihiro's arrival, hadn't they? Did that mean that sometimes Monobear's statements were just recordings? That might be useful. She wasn't sure _how_ exactly, but it was information that she hadn't had before now, so it was bound to be useful somehow.

"Let's go," she said to Chihiro.

"I think there'll be enough 'welcome' with the two of you," the boy in a dress said, back to looking at the wall. "Anyway, I'm too weak to move."

Sayaka bit back an immediate response. Instead, she turned on her heel, marched out into the hallway, picked up the bags of now cold food, marched back to the side of Chihiro's bed, and dumped them on top of him. "Get stronger," she snapped, then marched back out again.

"Still not eating, huh?" asked Ikusaba, who was standing in the hallway just outside the door.

"I don't want to talk about it," Sayaka nearly snarled in response.

"Well, if it keeps up, we can always try some force-feeding techniques I picked up."

"You've lived an interesting life," she replied in a tone which suggested a level of disinterest approaching the level of Ultimate Disinterested Girl.

"Kinda, yeah," Ikusaba agreed as they arrived in the medical room ... just as the panel slid open and a bag shot out, once again, onto the table. "So you wanna try and guess who's in it this time?"

"Not particularly."

"Oh, come on, it'll be fun."

"How will it be - oh, whatever. Uh ... Kirigiri. She's a creepy bitch, and she's bound to piss someone off somehow."

"Very true!" Ikusaba agreed, nodding. "Oh so very true."

"Aaaand ..." Sayaka continued, reaching up to pull down the zipper and expose the face of the latest arrival. "... nnnnnope."

Ishimaru Kiyotaka was just starting to regain consciousness as they looked down at him. "What?" he said woozily, eyes blinking, bandages covering most of his head.

Before they could respond in any way, the intercom came to life. "Ah-ah-hem!"

"Monobear?" Ishimaru asked vaguely.

Sayaka's head snapped up. "It _is_ a recording! And - there's another one coming in?"

"Get him off the table!" Ikusaba shouted.

The two girls quickly pulled Ishimaru's unresisting form out of the bag, supporting him between them. He was just barely clear when the panel on the wall opened up and a much larger bag shot out of it and onto the table, dislodging the remaining body bag so it dropped to the floor.

"A double homicide," Ikusaba said after a moment. "Things are starting to get a little crazy up there."

"Where am I?" Ishimaru asked.

Of course, they ignored him. "A bag that big ... it's got to be either Ogami or -" Sayaka started to say.

"Gyaaaaah!" shouted a male voice from inside the bag.

"Oh, great," Ikusaba and Sayaka chorused.

"Is this the afterlife?" Ishimaru mused, looking around confusedly.

The confused haze in the Ultimate Hall Monitor's eyes began to rapidly clear up once Sayaka unzipped the bag and Yamada Hifumi's hair spike shot out of it, followed soon by the rest of his head, complete with broken glasses and band. "WhatwhatwhatwhatwhatwhatWHAT?" the otaku nearly shrieked.

"Short version - you're not dead, but you're stuck down here for the duration," Ikusaba started to narrate. "The good news is, whoever killed you is up there, and even if they get caught and executed, they won't be joining us. Isn't that nice?"

"'Isn't that nice?'" Sayaka repeated.

"You sure thought it was nice when it was -"

"YOU!" Ishimaru yelled, eyes faintly glowing and hair inexplicably gone white as he pointed at Yamada. "YOU TRIED TO KILL ME!"

"What?" Yamada repeated, rolling back in his bag.

"SAY WHAT AGAIN! I DARE YOU!" Ishimaru's hands came up and he began to lunge towards the bagged comic book artist. "I ought to wring your gosh darn neck, you incestuous child!"

"I have no idea what you are talking about, Ishimaru Kiyotaka-dono!" Yamada protested as Ikusaba tried, with surprising difficulty, to hold Ishimaru back. "I don't even know what's going on -"

"You weren't actually murdered," Sayaka started to explain.

"Well, thank you, Maizono Sayaka-dono, but I don't even remember being murdered and thus cannot adequately appreciate not having been OOOOFFFF!" he concluded as he pushed himself backward just a bit too far and tipped off the edge of the table, landing face first on the medical bay's floor.

The three still standing in the bay stared.

When he hadn't made a noise or move for a moment or so, Sayaka spoke up. "Do you think he's actually dead?"

"We should be so lucky!" Ishimaru snarled, a bit of color starting to trickle back into his hair.

"... how do you do that?" Ikusaba asked, staring at said hair.

"Little help, please," Yamada's form croaked.

* * *

"So what _do_ you remember?" Sayaka asked, a few moments later, once they'd all repaired to the living room. She and Ikusaba were sitting on either side of Yamada, while Ishimaru - by now completely returned to what passed for normal with him - stood by the doorway glowering in Yamada's general direction.

"Well, we'd all just had a discussion about -" Yamada started to explain, then stopped short.

"Go on," Ikusaba pressed.

"Um ... we-um ... about a certain subject," he concluded, rather evasively. "And then Monobear gave the lights out signal, and just as I'd gotten back to my room, there was a knock at my door ... and then the next thing I knew, I was waking up inside that bag, back there."

"I remember that discussion, and the next morning as well," Ishimaru ground out. "I found a letter slipped under my door, claiming that the author had found a secret passage that led out of the school, and telling me to go to the physics lab and discuss it. Shortly after I arrived, however, I was ambushed by this person." He punctuated the words with a sharp gesture at Yamada.

"I see," Sayaka said, even though she didn't. Yamada's confusion seemed too genuine for him to be lying. Whatever else might be happening, she trusted her instincts about people. But then again, there was an unanswered question. "So what exactly was this certain subject that this discussion was about?"

"Um," Ishimaru and Yamada said in rough chorus.

"Oh, grow up," said a voice from the living room entrance. Chihiro, with a small dab of ketchup on her lips, sidled into the room, to the surprised stares of both of the new arrivals. "What difference does it make now?"

"Ah ... w-well ..." Yamada said, staring at Chihiro.

"Can Monobear listen in on our conversations, here?" Ishimaru asked, looking around suspiciously.

"Yep!" Monobear's voice announced cheerfully.

"... then we can't discuss that," Ishimaru said firmly.

"Oh, whatever, we'll probably find out during the trial," Ikusaba declared, just as the video screen came on.

* * *

Roughly two hours later ...

"What the hell was that even about?" Ikusaba asked, utterly baffled.

"That didn't explain anything!" Sayaka agreed. "And ... I mean, dropping a fire truck on someone? That's not even remotely ironic!"

"... it speaks great big volumes about you that you take issue with the _irony_ involved in the cold-blooded murder of one of our classmates," Chihiro said icily as he sat beside Yamada on the couch.

Yamada said nothing. As the trial had gotten started, he'd made all sorts of allegedly witty remarks, never passing up the chance to make reference to television shows and movies that none of them knew anything about. (Or at least, would not admit to that knowledge.) But once it had become clear that he had, in fact, been the person to 'kill' Ishimaru, he'd fallen silent, and grown steadily more ashen in his expression as the exact degree to which he'd been manipulated by Celeste became clear. He'd made a choking noise when she'd revealed her motive, and covered his face with his hands when the images of her execution were shown. They were still there now.

Ishimaru hadn't said anything - at least, nothing intelligible - for most of the trial. There'd been periodic angry noises coming from his direction, but his lips had never moved once. At least, not until the very finale of the execution, when he'd pronounced, in English, a single syllable concerning the genitals of the female body. It was impossible to tell if Yamada's shoulders, which had been slightly shaking the whole while, had done so more violently in response.

"So what _was_ that all about?" Chihiro finally asked, putting a hand on Yamada's knee. "I mean, even if you don't remember what happened, you can probably work out from what she said what your motive was, right? I really want to understand -"

That was when Yamada started bawling.

"No, we can't tell you," Ishimaru said, raising his voice to be heard above Yamada's grief-stricken wails. "However - Yamada-kun!" he snapped. "Stop that racket at once."

Somewhat amazingly, Yamada quieted.

"I cannot condone your actions. They were drastic violations of school regulations and of basic human decency. Notwithstanding that fact, however ... I must confess that I do understand the motives behind your actions ... and in light of them, I will try to allow you to make amends."

"You understand the motives," Sayaka said.

"I do."

"Well, fucking hurray for you, asswipe, what about the rest of us?" she shouted.

"Seriously, why in the world would the two of you be so ready to kill each other?" Chihiro said, clearly uncomfortable to be agreeing with Sayaka on anything. "What could possibly have been -"

And then he blinked. He looked at Ishimaru, who looked away uncomfortably. He looked at Yamada, who peered shame-facedly at him through the fingers of his hands.

Chihiro blinked. A strange grin spread across his face. "No," he said. "Really?"

"What?" Sayaka asked.

The grin vanished. "Oh, I wouldn't want to speculate," Chihiro said airily.

"You wouldn't _be_ speculating! I think you know what's going on here!"

"You might very well think that," Chihiro replied. "I couldn't possibly comment."

"Okaaaay, I guess I'm not gonna get answers out of any of you, either," Monobear's voice announced, as his image appeared on the screen. "I could be a total asshole and make your next meal conditional on an explanation, but that would be petty and wrong and ... well, now that I start talking about it, I can't see why I shouldn't do it. But I won't. I'm funny that way. Shall we get on with the porn, then?"

"Porn?" Ishimaru and Yamada said in chorus.

Monobear waved his arms above his head. "Oh come now! Really, you two! That's twice now that you've had the opportunity to explain to your new kohai in the business about what's about to happen, and failed to do so! What is wrong with you?"

Ikusaba was opening her mouth to make some sort of retort, but Sayaka narrowly beat her to it. "We kind of had other stuff on our minds, okay?" she protested.

The other girl made a face at that remark, but pressed on regardless. "And anyway, if you're listening in on everything we say, shouldn't you have known that we hadn't -"

"Don't throw my own words back at me!" Monobear shrieked, arms waving rapidly and sinister red eye glowing faintly. "Fine! Short version - make porn for me to sell, or you don't get to eat!"

"Absolutely not!" Ishimaru snapped, walking right up to the monitor. "Not only would that be a grotesque violation of school rules -"

"Not in school no more, dumbass!"

He proceeded to ignore the bear. "- but also of the criminal code of this nation! We're all minors! It is a crime to produce and distribute erotic material featuring minors!"

"Determined to live up to grandpa, aren't you?" Monobear wisecracked. "Unfortunately for your stupid argument, that law has been overturned in the interim since your arrival at this school."

"In just a few days?" Ishimaru asked, clearly disbelieving.

"No comment. Moving forward ... I have good news for you bastards! I honestly wasn't expecting to get five of you down here already, so there's been another change in procedure. We'll only be featuring four of you in any of the scenes we shoot until the next lucky person arrives, so one of you will get to take the day off, each day. All of you still get fed, but one of you gets to go hide in your room or whatever. Isn't that a swell deal?"

_Actually, it is,_ thought Sayaka. _**Too** swell._ "What's the catch?"

"Why would you imagine that there's a catch?" Monobear asked. As Sayaka opened her mouth to reply, the bear pushed on. "Let me rephrase, why would you imagine that I'd explain the catch? Oh, fine, I'll explain the catch. I'm just soooo benevolent today! The catch is, you have to decide who gets the day off amongst yourselves. Have fun doing that, folks!" And with that remark, the screen went black.

Silence reigned for a moment.

"I was here first," Sayaka announced. "Just getting that out there."

* * *

The heated debate - to perhaps lend it far too much dignity - went on for quite some time. Voices were raised, names were called, and accusations were made. Of all of them, only Ikusaba didn't get involved, aside from a few choice remarks that she threw in to stir the pot.

"Enough!" Yamada finally yelled. "As I believe that I once said, I have no interest in 3D romance."

"Romance has nothing to do with any of this," Chihiro told him bluntly.

"Nevertheless, while that was ... not ... completely ... true ... when I said it, but subsequent events have definitely convinced me that it is not for me. And I am not so foolish as to believe that any of you would voluntarily choose to partner with me -"

"Eh, I'd be okay with it," Ikusaba interjected. "I've been with other fat guys. They weren't the worst lays I've ever had."

"I genuinely did not need to know that," Yamada said after a moment.

"I don't think any of us did," Sayaka said, her disgust not augmented by any non-existent memories of encounters with obese record executives that had never happened.

"Moving forward," Yamada continued, removing his glasses momentarily to rub his eyes. "Since only Enoshima Junko-dono -"

"She's Ikusaba Mukuro, not -" Sayaka started to interrupt.

"Why? Why? Why? Why will no one allow me to engage in monologue?" Yamada shrieked to the ceiling, his fists clenched.

"... please continue," Chihiro said after a moment.

"Since only the person whom I knew as Enoshima Junko-dono would condescend to partner with me, any encounters with anyone else would be as involuntary on their part as they would be on mine," Yamada said as briskly as possible, perhaps not trusting any of them to really permit his monologue. "And I believe, from what was said, that I was drawn into certain intrigues by the suggestion that ... involuntary and inappropriate acts had been committed against another. I hold those who do such things in the deepest contempt ... and will not descend to them myself. In light of that, I believe that I should receive the day off."

"You do realize that it's just for today, right?" Sayaka asked, once she felt reasonably certain he was done talking. "You're going to have to eventually -"

"I will spend the day coming to terms with that, Maizono Sayaka- _san_."

The honorific slammed into her, and for a dizzying moment, Sayaka found herself aching to have a knife in her hand. Throttling that wish, and the impulses that came with it, she turned away. "Fuck off, then," she sneered.

"That I shall," Yamada said, bowing slightly to Chihiro ... then, more deeply, to Ishimaru. And with that, he waddled towards the door out of the living room.

"Wait," said Ishimaru. "I ... I have had a revelation! My brother's soul resides in my form, and so I am two people, thus -"

"Do you have two dicks?" Sayaka asked bluntly.

"Um."

"Didn't think so," she said, and started to pull off her smock.

"Ah-buh, ah-buh, ah-buh," Ishimaru stammered as Sayaka stripped down in front of him.

"So how're we going to do this?" asked Ikusaba, starting to unbutton her blouse.

"Aren't you the one who usually takes the lead?" Sayaka asked, glancing at her.

"Yes, but doing that all the time is kind of boring, don't you think? Besides, I want to see what happens when my best pupil flies freely."

Sayaka rolled her eyes at that. "Fine. You're with Chihiro-chan, then, and I'll take care of Mr. Two Souls, here. If we finish off before Monobear calls cut, maybe we'll switch off."

"How's that sound to you?" Ikusaba asked Chihiro.

"You are moderately less disgusting than she is, so I guess that I'll put up with it," the cross-dresser said with a sigh. "And thank you for asking, not that it would have made a difference if I _did_ say no."

"Eh, I'd have come up with something else," Ikusaba told him, then pounced.

"So, anyway -" Sayaka said to Ishimaru.

"Ah-buh, ah-buh, ah-buh!"

With an annoyed grunt, she gave him a good swift shove in the pecs, startling him enough to send him wobbling back against the couch so that he collapsed into the seat. Before he could react further, she was on him, kissing his mouth with a well-practiced hunger, pressed up against him and with her hands easily working the fasteners of his pants. Getting his dick out was a simple procedure, by now, and so was stroking it vigorously, and then pulling back to go down and start sucking it.

Five minutes later, though, it was obvious to her that something was terribly wrong here, as she let the still soft member drop from her lips and glared up at him. "Why the fuck aren't you hard yet?" she growled.

"This, this isn't right - and - and - rules - _rules!_ "

"The only rules down here are the ones Monobear makes!" Sayaka said. "Get it up already! Shit, Chihiro wasn't this soft after he'd been in Mukuro's mouth a few moments, and he's a -"

"And I'm not attracted to women!" Ishimaru shrieked, hands over his face.

A tiny snort of laughter interrupted the 'oh yeah"s that were coming from the other side of the room, where Ikusaba was bent over on all fours with Chihiro pounding away at her.

"Figures," Sayaka said. She licked her own pointer finger down to the last knuckle then proceeded to shove it up his ass without any further warning.

"AH!"

"That did the trick," she said, and resumed fellatio.

"Nuuuhhh!" Ishimaru gasped.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," Sayaka grumbled once she decided that his dick wasn't going to get any harder. It was larger than Chihiro's, but still on the small side of average based on her entirely academic understanding of such matters. Hopefully, it wasn't going to nut off as soon as she made him put it in. Not that she wanted to spend a lot of time humping him, but if he did, they'd have to do this whole stupid routine again in order to get him ready for the pop shot.

_Well, better get on with it,_ she decided, then rose up and, without further ado, sat down on his lap, sliding the dick up into her.

"Nuuuhhh!" Ishimaru gasped.

"Oh shut up and fuck me already, dumbass," she told him.

Of course, he didn't heed her clever advice, but just stared at her in undisguised horror. She wondered if he was frightened of the possibility that, having taken his dick, she was never going to give it back to him. Castration anxiety, or something like that. Sayaka decided that she found that notion amusing as she started to rock back and forth on top of him, and reached back to squeeze his balls with her hand so as to create more anxiety of that nature.

It clearly worked like she hoped. His face got even more twisted in panic. "S-stop!" he yelled coherently, pushing at her stomach ... but feebly, as though torn between fear of her and fear of doing her harm.

_Pathetic,_ she thought, sliding her shins under his thighs to keep him wrapped against her, despite his shoving, and at the same time exploiting the motion so that they seemed to flow to a more missionary-style position, him above her, her head resting on one of the couch's arm rests.

"This, this is _wrong!_ " Ishimaru protested.

"No shit, Sherlock, but I bet your asshole brother wouldn't have been such a fucking pansy!" she yelled in his face. "Can I get him in here? He'd know how to fuck a bitch, I bet!"

"Stop it! Brother was a virtuous -"

"He was a fucking motorcycle punk!" Sayaka screeched. "Sex and drugs and rock and roll and all that crap!" And then she smiled cruelly. "But you know, if you really have his soul in you, then you should be ready to make amends for the stuff he did. And you know how you're gonna do that?"

"Wha-wha-wha -" he stammered.

"By getting a different man in you!" Ikusaba declared as she wrestled Chihiro into position and penetrated Ishimaru's exposed ass with the other boy's cock.

"Nyaaah!"

Sayaka wasn't sure which one of them was screaming. It might have been both. It might even have been her, exclaiming a bit of pain at having the weight of two boys on her, now. For all she knew, it could even have been Yamada, watching and expressing sympathetic pain.

It didn't matter.

It was music to her ears.

* * *

It was impossible to tell, of course, but it seemed to Sayaka that Monobear kept the scene going a lot longer than he had when there were only three of them. Maybe keeping going after he'd called it quits hadn't been such a good idea after all. Well, there'd been a lot to do this time, bringing both boys off, then getting them hard again so that Ikusaba could make another sandwich, with herself as the meat this time. (She was such a total slut, Sayaka had mused while riding the doubly-penetrated girl's mouth.) But eventually, it came to an end, and Chihiro and Ishimaru headed off to their rooms with disturbed expressions on their faces.

This time, though, the realization that she'd missed something important had been building for a while now, so she didn't bother to go get cleaned up (or indeed, dressed) before dashing over to the TV. She searched through the DVR menu for the most-recently viewed trial and watched it again, fast-forwarding over much of it until she got to the conclusion, confirming her recollection. That done, she got up again and headed out of the living room and down the hallway, to the third room on the left, now marked with a cute little Yamada image.

The real Yamada, nowhere nearly as cute, opened the door after a moment of her pounding on it, munching on a cheeseburger. "Um kunda un duh muhhhhh -" he started to say, before his jaw dropped and the half-chewed food dropped onto his shirtfront.

"Gross!" Sayaka said, stepping back away from him. "What _is_ your problem?"

"Wha-wha-wha -" he stammered for a moment, before gaining a bit of poise. "You're naked!" he finally yelled.

She blinked. "Oh. Right. Well, get used to it, moron, you're going to be seeing a lot more of it starting tomorrow."

"Oh, so you're not taking tomorrow off, either?" asked Ikusaba, poking her head out her own door, back down the hallway. "Mind if I do it, then?"

"Not what I meant, and - not now!" Sayaka shouted.

"Sheesh."

"Why did you -" Yamada asked.

"Yasuhiro Taeko," she said. "Ludenberg's real name. You knew it. How?"

"I did?" he asked blankly.

"It was your last words before you lost consciousness!" she reminded him.

"I don't remember that happening, Maizono Sayaka-san," he reminded her, then relented a bit. "Nor do I recall knowing that information. Maybe she told me when she was tricking me?"

"Then why didn't she mention doing that in that pantomime she did of your conversation?" Sayaka asked, ignoring the insult this time. "No, somehow, you knew her real name. You found that out. How?"

"I don't know," he repeated. "What difference does it make?"

"It's a mystery. That's ... that _has_ to be the reason that your memories were edited, to take away that information which you'd gained somehow. It's a mystery, and if we solve it -"

"Well, good luck with that," he told her, and shut the door in her face.

"Don't be so damn obstructive!" she shouted at the closed door.

"I guess he just doesn't like you," said Chihiro's voice from behind her. "I can't imagine why."

She whirled to glare at him, saw that he, too, was eating. "So the hunger strike is over, then?"

"Yes," Chihiro replied calmly. "I have something to live for, now."

"What?" Sayaka asked suspiciously.

He smile, and took another bite of his sandwich.

"Oh, come on!"

Swallowing, Chihiro looked meditative. "Do you think Monobear's listening to us? Right now?"

"Possibly, yes."

"Well, then, if he's listening, then there's no way that I can possibly wreck everyone else's efforts by blabbing the secret that they're trying to keep. Particularly since it's important to me, too. And if he's not listening ... then you're a complete bitch and I would never tell you anyway. See you later," he added, and sauntered back into his room, whistling.

**To Be Continued**


	5. Chapter 5

On some level, Sayaka supposed that it was a good thing that Yamada had gotten over his qualms about 'involuntary and inappropriate acts'. After all, she reasoned as he pounded into her while she lay on her back on the couch, spitting venomous accusations about her sexual preferences and occasional actual spittle at her, he would probably survive the longest if they got denied food, and, for that matter, have the fewest compunctions about eating the corpses of those who'd starved to death. Plus, she decided as she faked some more sobbing protests, he was surprisingly good at being a fake rapist, honestly better than she was at pretending to have been raped. Of course, her inadequacy in that area doubtless resulted from her never having ever actually been the victim of any 'involuntary and inappropriate acts'.

In the four 'days' (meals, sleeps, whatever) since Ishimaru and Yamada's arrival, they'd rotated 'days off'. Today had been Ishimaru's day off; tomorrow, at long last, would be Sayaka's chance to enjoy a day where she didn't have to fuck for her food. Really, she couldn't wait for today's shitty sexual encounter to be over, since she had every intention of crawling into her bed and staying there until the start of filming on the day after. She was still convinced that they were all inside some sort of puzzle, but her efforts to find more of the pieces of the puzzle had gotten her exactly nowhere. A day without having to work or without further searching would do her good.

But first, she had to get through this. Happily, from the sounds Yamada was making, she thought he was pretty close to climax. "Noooo!" she fake sobbed as she tried to remember whether she'd been instructed to get creampied today. _No, Monobear said he wanted a facial. Right._ "Don't pull out! Don't debase me further!"

"Nuugh!" Yamada grunted as he spewed inside of her.

_You dipshit._

"And that's a wrap!" Monobear's voice cried from the TV screen. "Great work, everybody!"

Yamada started to pull back and away from her, but paused. "Um ... are you all right, Maizono Sayaka-d- ahem. Maizono Sayaka-san?"

"Just. Fucking. Dandy," she told him, annoyed by his pathetically transparent fake concern. "Why the hell didn't you pull out?"

"... you, you told me not to," he reminded her.

"And you listened to that instead of all the no, stop, don't do this crap I spewed at you?" Sayaka asked as she pushed herself up to a seated position. "Dumbass! I was giving you a cue!"

"Oh. Um. I apologize."

"Yeah, whatever," Sayaka said as she forced herself to stand up, and looked over at the other couch, which was confusingly empty. "Where the hell are the other two?"

"Ikusaba Mukuro-dono and Fujisaki Chihiro-dono finished their scene and departed some time ago," Yamada answered.

For a moment, Sayaka found herself wanting to scream just how utterly unfair it was that Ikusaba, who'd done just as much to Chihiro without the little twerp's consent as she had, still got '-dono' from him, but it would be simpler and easier to just go away and leave him sitting naked on the couch, looking uncomfortable and ashamed of himself. Or faking those looks. Who knew anymore?

On that note, she departed, walked back to her room, picked up the bag of fast food which had been mysteriously deposited at the doorway, and walk in. She showered, ate, and then climbed into bed, asleep almost as soon as her eyes closed, and looking forward to a tranquil day off.

* * *

"Ah-ah-hem!" declared Monobear's voice over the loudspeaker, yanking her out of dreamless sleep. As the recording went on, she decided to settle down to sleep again, since the usual formula didn't force anyone to go see the new arrival. Chihiro hadn't, and nothing had happened to him.

And then her eyes snapped open.

_... we'll only be featuring four of you in any of the scenes we shoot until the next lucky person arrives ..._

_... until the next lucky person arrives ..._

_... arrives ..._

"Oh, fucking hell!" Sayaka shrieked as she got out of bed.

Oddly, the bag hadn't actually arrived by the time Sayaka ran into the mortician's room, where everyone else was already gathered.

"Hey, great!" said Ikusaba, grinning broadly. "I was worried that we weren't going to get a demonstration of your unzipping style."

Sayaka briefly told her what she could do with her style, in terms that turned Ishimaru white and Yamada pink. (Annoyingly, Chihiro didn't bother to change color at all.) "Am I the only one of you bastards who's realized what this means?" she asked to conclude her rant.

"Why don't you bestow your wisdom upon us, oh sage?" asked Chihiro.

"Monobear said that the situation where we got time off would last until the next arrival! Which means that once the next arrival gets here, we don't get days off anymore!"

The declaration caused a certain stir. Ikusaba actually seemed a bit startled, Ishimaru's teeth started grinding, and Yamada looked like he was about to do the face slapping and shouting 'what' business again, for the first time since his arrival.

"Or, alternatively, since we'll have six people here instead of five, two people get days off instead of only one," Chihiro suggested blandly.

Sayaka stared at the boy in the skirt. "In all the time you've been here, what has possibly given you the idea that Monobear would ever be that nice?" she asked, acid dripping from every word.

"Well, he's never sexually assaulted me, for one."

Before Sayaka could open her mouth to tell Chihiro to get over it, already - honestly, did he think he was the only person in the world who'd ever been raped or something? - the cubby hole opened and a huge bag, larger than the one Yamada had been wearing when he arrived, shot out of it and onto the table.

They stared at it for a moment.

"Gee," said Ikusaba, sarcastically. "I wonder who it could possibly be?"

"Maybe they put more than one person in this one?" Chihiro speculated.

"I wonder what the heck happened?" Ishimaru asked.

"Well, let's find out," said Sayaka, and reached for the zipper.

Before her fingers even touched it, the seam of the bag tore asunder, thick, powerful fingers pulling it apart. "Hraaaaaghhh!" said Ogami Sakura as her tanned skin and long white hair surged into view. Everyone took a step back, but after emerging from the bag, all the martial artist did was to breathe heavily for several moments, eyes wild and unseeing.

"Ogami Sakura-dono?" Yamada asked, hesitantly.

Her eyes focused. "Ah," she said, gazing at those surrounding her. "I see I am in hell, then."

With that note, she sort of rolled off the table and dropped to the floor with something of a crash.

* * *

Between the five of them, they were able to help Ogami back to her feet and keep her there. Sayaka found the situation a bit odd. There weren't any wounds on the tall girl, at least not that she could see, but she seemed even more dizzy and weak than Chihiro had been - and Chihiro, of course, had been subjected to some sort of injuries 'post-mortem'. Had the mastermind done something to Ogami while she was unconscious, so as to make her weaker and easier to manage?

If so, then it seemed to be wearing off when they arrived in the living room, and Ogami was sat down on the couch. She looked around with eyes that were still a bit unsteady and glassy, but her voice was even when she spoke. "All right," she said. "As I was clearly mistaken about this being hell, the question of where we are remains."

Ishimaru took the lead on explaining the situation - most of it, at least. Just like Ikusaba and Sayaka had explained it to him, he left out the most disturbing part of the situation, focusing on the fact that they were unable to leave and couldn't contact anyone who were still among the "living" -

"Obviously," Sakura interrupted. "What aren't you telling me?"

"Uh, well," Ishimaru hemmed.

"It's a bit, ah," Yamada hawed.

"They make us have sex with each other and film it, and if we don't take part, we aren't given food," Chihiro replied bluntly.

Ogami stared at the cross-dressing boy in total silence. "I'm sorry," she rumbled. "I think I must have misheard what you just said."

"Nope," Ikusaba chimed in.

"That pretty much covers it," Sayaka agreed.

"... I see," said Ogami after a moment of consideration. "I do hope you realize -"

"Oh, great, you finally explained the whole situation to someone before I had to do it!" interjected Monobear as his image appeared on the TV screen. "Great job, you bastards! Anyway, now that we've got a new arrival, all that stuff about days off is history."

"I _knew_ it!" Sayaka growled, hand over her eyes.

"And, since we've got three guys and three girls, now, I guess the best way to start off would be -"

"Hold it," Sayaka interrupted, hand coming down. "Aren't you forgetting something?"

"Nope," Monobear said. "Well, I might have forgotten the lyrics to your songs, Sayaka-chan, but let's face the facts, they're really forget-"

"That's not what I meant, and I don't care whether you remember them," she snapped, telling the absolute unvarnished truth. "I meant the school trial, where we find out who killed Ogami!"

"No one killed me," Ogami interjected. "I ended my own life."

"... you did what?" Sayaka asked, stunned.

"I committed suicide. Or at least what I believed to be suicide. I drank poison from the chemistry lab, and lost consciousness," Ogami elaborated. "So then, I hope that you understand that the threat of being starved to death if I do not engage in the obscenity these people are describing ... does not really hold any terror for me," she added, looking at Monobear on the screen.

"Oh, really," the bear asked, clawed paw coming up and red eye gleaming. "And what about all of them? Are you okay with starving all the other bastards down there with you, too?"

Sakura's eyes closed. "I would be unhappy to be the cause of that," she admitted.

"Well then -" Monobear started to say.

"But on the other hand, you ordered me to bring about the deaths of my classmates, if I didn't want to see the destruction of my family's dojo," Ogami continued without opening her eyes. "So one could perhaps argue that I am attempting to fulfill your instructions. And furthermore, I would be much more unhappy if I betrayed Kenshiro, even involuntarily. So there it is." She nodded once.

Sayaka wanted to ask who 'Kenshiro' was. But she found it difficult to talk at the moment, as a nightmare beyond imagination began to unfold before her. There was no way, even if they pooled their efforts, that they could force Ogami to do anything. Weakened as she was, the girl was still more than a match for all of them - and Sayaka suspected that the others wouldn't even try, even at the risk of their lives.

_No,_ she told herself. _No, there has to be a way out of this. My destiny - I am not going to starve to death down here, I still have a **destiny!**_

"Welp, if that's how you want to play it, then I guess that we'll do things that way," Monobear said, undergoing another one of his abrupt changes of mood. "I'll be sure to check in every now and again as you bastards starve, just to see whether there's been any changes of heart, but -"

And then Sayaka saw it.

"You've got that wrong!" she shouted, as she'd seen Naegi do in the trials before now.

Everyone stared at her.

"... it's a little early to be going mad with hunger, don't you think?" Ikusaba asked.

"Shut up!" Sayaka cast over her shoulder as she glared at Monobear. "We're supposed to believe that you, Mr. Fun and Games, didn't have a school trial even if what happened to Ogami was a suicide? That you didn't manipulate people to make them think that there was an actual murder? That you didn't try to trick them into accusing someone else of committing the murder, so you'd have the excuse to execute them all for guessing it wrong."

A horrified look emerged on Ogami's face. "No," she gasped, then stared at the TV screen. "Tell me you didn't use what I did to kill them!"

"Never even thought of that, did you!" Sayaka snarled over her shoulder as she kept her eyes on Monobear, who was visibly nervous. "Only thinking about yourself, you and your lousy - never mind! Did you or didn't you?"

Monobear gulped. "I - I didn't!"

_Nooooo!_

"I mean," Monobear added, oblivious to Sayaka's internal panic, "I might just possibly have set things up so that a certain other person did that ... when they read a slightly edited suicide note, I mean -" 

"You used Asahina to do this?" Sakura cried, almost rising from the couch. 

"- but hey, it didn't work!" Monobear quickly continued. "Those bastards up there, they're wayyyy too clever for me! The plan failed, and they figured it out." The bear appeared to sigh. "No executions, this time. And the whole trial is really kind of boring, so I just didn't want to bother you with it, since there's no real punch line without an execution." 

"You didn't find an excuse to execute someone anyway? Or something? Maybe, I don't know, show them videos of Ogami's dojo getting blown up?" Sayaka demanded, desperation growing. 

Monobear looked very solemn. "With this paw, over this heart," he said, resting his right paw on his left breast. "I swear, I didn't blow up Ogami's dojo as a result of the trial, and no living person was executed." 

In the silence that followed, Sayaka could almost hear her mind starting to break. There was no way out. There was no way out. There was nowayout. Therewasnowayoutnowayoutnowayouuuuuuuuut! 

"You son of a bitch," Chihiro said, breaking the silence and sounding angrier than Sayaka had ever heard him before. 

"Huh?" Sayaka asked, jolted out of the death spiral of her sanity. 

"... that's sort of a mean thing to say about my mom," Monobear replied, sounding shocked. "She was a bear, not a dog!" 

Of course, Chihiro ignored that. "He killed Alter Ego!" he cried out. "That's what he means by 'no living soul'!" 

"What?" Sayaka asked. 

"What?!" chorused Ishimaru and Yamada, rising to their feet and drowning Sayaka's voice with their shared outrage. 

"No!" Ogami gasped, looking almost faint. "Why would you do that? He had nothing to do with anything that happened in my case?" 

"WHAT THE HELL IS AN ALTER EGO, AND WHY ARE YOU ALL SO FIRED UP ABOUT IT?" Sayaka finally shrieked. 

"Alter Ego is the artificial intelligence I created on my laptop," Chihiro replied through tears. "He was the kidnapping victim that set off the mutual killing of those two." He gestured towards Yamada and Ishimaru. 

Sayaka stared at him. "You built an artificial intelligence on your laptop?" she asked weakly. 

_"That's what I _just_ said, you evil bitch!"_

She wasn't listening, but rather turning to look at Yamada and Ishimaru. "And you two developed a crush on it?" she asked, still weakly. 

"It wasn't a crush! He was the vessel through which my brother's soul entered into me and -" Ishimaru started to rant. 

"It has nothing to do with your brother's soul, _she_ is a kind and wise angel who -" Yamada started to rant. 

"If it helps, I have no idea what's going on here either," Ikusaba told Sayaka. 

"It doesn't help," Sayaka said weakly. 

"Well, screw you too." 

"Really, this is all news to me, too!" Monobear interjected, waving his little arms on screen. "I had no idea such a thing could possibly exist in this day and age! And surely, if you were so clever at hiding it, I would never be able to find it, unless you did something realllly stupid." 

"... the main computer," Chihiro guessed, looking aghast. "He asked to be hooked up to the main computer, to get more information, and, and -" 

"But even if that happened, this program of yours would have been able to recognize that Monobear was coming to get it, and called for help somehow!" Ikusaba protested. "Unless - that must be it! Monobear sent its mole to get it, and the computer didn't recognize her as a threat!" 

Ogami stared at Ikusaba in shock. 

"If you don't remember, it's not that surprising," Sayaka said. "The mastermind wiped part of Yamada's memories, too, and -" 

"Why did you just call me a mole?" Sakura asked. 

"Well ... duh, that's what you were," Ikusaba said, eyebrow raised. "You just admitted that you were working for Monobear, and -" 

"But I never used the word 'mole'," Ogami interrupted. "No one has used that word down here. But up there ... up there, it was used all the time. But you've had no knowledge of what was going on up there ..." 

"It's just a natural word for someone who -" 

"And also, Enoshima Junko -" 

"She's Ikusaba Mukuro," Sayaka said, weary of repeating this. 

"I don't care if she's the Queen of Spain. I do care that her freckles are slightly different than they were when I met her," Ogami said heavily. 

Ikusaba let out a long sigh. "Really," she said. "Really. What sort of person memorizes the arrangement of someone else's freckles? You always were such a weird mix of smart and stupid, Sakura-chan." 

Before the oddness of that address could really penetrate, she reached behind her and pulled out a strange device with a button on top, thumb firmly pressing down on it. 

"One step, and I blow all your heads off," said Enoshima Junko. 

* * *

**A While Ago**

_"You said ... they were going to die ... you said ..."_

_"Mukuro-chan. Dear, sweet Mukuro-chan. My best-beloved and utterly useless big sister. It is so funny that you of all people should not realize_ what a liar I am. _" And now she grinned. "We're going to do much worse things to them than that. Are you ready to play your new role in all of this?"_

_There was really only one answer she could give to that question from her little sister, who was the most important person in the world to her, whom she did not want to see suffer the horrible fate of becoming so bored with the world that her anger turned inward again. There was really only one answer that she could give._

_So she gave it._

_"No," she said quietly._

_Junko's face stopped shifting between one set of expressions and another, remained lodged there for a perceptible interval, and then, quite suddenly, shifted to her true expression. Or rather, non-expression. "What?" she asked._

_"No," said Mukuro. "I can't do what you're proposing. It's one thing to kill someone, and one thing to manipulate someone into killing someone else and then punish them for doing so ... but to manipulate someone into killing someone else, faking that murder the way that you did mine, and then punishing them anyway? No. It's wrong. I don't like that kind of despair." Her eyes closed. "I expect that you'll probably kill me, now. I'm glad that it's you, and not someone else."_

_"Mukuro-chan," Junko said, sounding genuinely hurt. Mukuro's eyes blinked open, and she was startled to see the mournful expression on her sister's face. "Do you really think that I would do something like that to you? Do you really think, having known the despair of murdering someone I loved already, that I'd want to revisit that? I could never kill my sister, dear, sweet Mukuro-chan." And then she looked up, so that Mukuro couldn't see her expression. "Mikan-chan," she said sweetly. "Please kill my sister, dear, sweet Mukuro-chan."_

_"Yes, Junko-sama," came a high-pitched voice out of the darkness surrounding them._

_Junko promptly turned and walked out of Mukuro's sight, as Tsumiki Mikan stepped into view, wearing a surgical smock (over nothing at all, it seemed) and a wide, almost Junko-esque grin. "I'm probably going to mess this up and you'll probably experience a lot of unnecessary pain as I vivisect you. Please, please, forgive meeeeee!"_

_In the last moments before the pain began, Mukuro mused that her last words to Junko had probably been something of a mistake. And she decided that she didn't like this kind of despair either._

* * *

Everyone was frozen. Everyone was staring. Only Sayaka could find the strength to speak. "Ikusa-" she began to say. Then realization struck her. "No. You're her sister. You're the actual Enoshima Junko, aren't you?" 

"The one, the only," Junko confirmed with a smirk. 

"Really, you bastards should have figured it out a lot sooner than you did," Monobear's image said from the screen. "I mean, I kept calling her by her right name all this time. Why didn't any of you question that?" 

"I did," Sayaka said. "You just ... just didn't ... because the answer was obvious," she concluded at last. 

"Yeesh!" said Monobear, clearly pouting. "It's bad enough Junko-chan guesses what I'm going to say before I say it - do you have to start?" 

Junko coughed and, with her free hand, made a gesture towards the television screen. It promptly turned off. 

"You're working for the mastermind as well?" Ogami said, eyes wide. "But, but that means -" 

"Oh, so close, and yet so very, very far," Junko said with a mournful expression. "Anyway, it's really been despair-inducing, watching all of you descend into immorality and degeneracy on the vague notion that doing so would let you live just a day longer, and when I release the recordings of it to the world, I bet a lot of people will despair to watch the hope of the new age doing that sort of thing to each other. But I think we've reached the end of that sequence of events. You've given me what I need to make sure that, even if the ones up there do figure out what happened to Sakura-chan, I can still break their spirits ... by destroying the little toy that you left behind for them." This was said with a glance towards Chihiro. 

"No, don't -" Ishimaru shouted, on the verge of moving towards her. 

Junko's face and hand jerked in his direction. In that moment, her face became as empty and expressionless as an unpainted mask. "I lie a lot, but sometimes I speak the truth, too. Step towards me, and I'll kill every person in this room. You were all under my care for a while. Do you really want to know just what I did to you while you were?" 

Ishimaru froze again. 

"'Even if'," Chihiro repeated. "Then ... you didn't show us the trial because it hasn't happened yet!" 

"Oh so vewwy vewwy clever!" Junko said, in the most cutesy voice imaginable. "Yay! Right now, all your besties are still trying to figure out what happened to poor widdle Sakura-chan! And you know? And you know? One of them is doing her very best to make sure that they _don't!_ " 

"Asahina!" Ogami gasped. "NO!" 

"YES!" Junko said, mimicking Ogami's delivery exactly. 

"What ... what are you going to do to us, now?" asked Yamada. 

"Haven't really figured that out. I'll probably kill you _eventually_ , but I'd like to let you build up some hope that it won't happen so that the despair you feel as it does is that much greater," Junko admitted. "But if you give me a reason, of course ..." She shrugged. 

"There never was a way out of here," Sayaka said woodenly. "I was ... I was just seeing what I wanted to see." 

"Awww," Junko said, gazing at her with apparent sympathy. "No, no, that's not true at all. It's like Monobear told you at the beginning. The only way out is if you kill someone without anyone else realizing that you did it. And you know what? Out of everyone here, of all these victims ... you are the only one who has the right attitude. Not the competence, unfortunately, but ... well, just like your sexual skills, that can be taught. And you know what else? 

"I've decided I'm going to teach you." 

Faster than an eyeblink. Before any of them could say or do anything, Junko had dashed over to Sayaka, slammed their lips together in one last kiss, and _shoved the switch she'd been holding tightly in her hand into Sayaka's hand._

"Dead man switch," she said, before a panel in the ceiling opened up above her, and a gigantic sucking sound could be heard. "You fire it by letting go. Byeeeee!" she concluded, and then was gone from sight. 

What felt like a long moment of silence descended on the living room. 

"Well," said Ishimaru, doing his best to look like he wasn't looking at Sayaka - who was actually in no position to notice him doing so, as her attention was completely focused on the switch clutched tightly in her hand. "These have been some very disturbing revelations, wouldn't you all agree? Ogami, do you think that you could break through that panel?" 

Sakura had been looking up at it since it had closed. "I suspect that I probably can, if we move the furniture to give me a place to stand, but that's only the start of our problems," she grumbled. "We don't know how long the chute is, we don't know what sort of traps are set up along its length, we don't know where it ends up. And I'm fairly sure that it's too narrow for myself or Yamada." 

"If I have to, I'll be one who climbs it," Chihiro announced, sounding desperate. "But we have to get back up there, to tell the others what's really going on and save Alter Ego! Let's get that furnit-" 

And that, of course, was when Sayaka started laughing. 

Needless to say, it was not a nice sounding laugh. It was not a delicate giggle, uttered by a girl who covered her mouth as it issued. It had all the sweetness of fingernails being drawn across a chalkboard. 

"Uhhhh ... do, do you have a different suggestion, Maizono Sayaka-dono?" Yamada asked, sounding appropriately frightened. 

"Oh!" she gasped, then laughed some more. "Oh!" she said again. "So _now_ it's 'Sayaka-dono', is it? Now that I've got this!" She shoved the hand which was tightly gripping the switch in Yamada's general direction, making him recoil ... which prompted more laughter from her. 

"Maizono-san," Ogami said, starting to slowly get up - still moving with difficulty, but also with implacable nature of a glacier. "I'm asking you to please calm down. This has been very stressful, but -" 

Sayaka stopped laughing and stared at Ogami, making her freeze. "You have no fucking clue," she said. 

"All right," Sakura said, after a moment. "You have a gun pointed at all of our heads. But I don't think you've realized that it's pointed at your own, as well. If you release that button, whatever is done to us will be done to you as well. You were also subjected to whatever modifications were done to us. You will -" 

"Nuh-uh," Sayaka interrupted. 

"... did she really just say 'nuh-uh'?" Ishimaru quietly asked Chihiro. 

"You heard her," she pressed on. "She likes me. She said that I was going to be okay." 

"No, she didn't," Sakura insisted. "And even if she did imply that you were her sort of person, she is a liar -" 

"- except when she tells the truth. She was nice to me. And the rest of you?" Her head snapped to glare at Ishimaru, Yamada and Chihiro. "You all hate me! You look at me with contempt! You treat me like dirt, like scum, like -" Her gaze focused on Chihiro. " _You keep calling me a rapist!_ " she shouted at last. 

Chihiro opened his mouth, perhaps to offer a demurral. That wasn't what issued, though, when he finally spoke. "Well, you are." 

"You just did it again," Sayaka said, stunned. 

"You are a rapist, and a would-be murderer, and a liar, and someone who tried to frame an innocent party for your misdeeds," Chihiro continued. 

" _I was just **pretending!**_ " 

"Well, you're not pretending now," Chihiro said. "Now, if you do this, and if you survive, you will not only be all of that, but also a mass murderer. And all for what? For a vague notion that you can leave this place and go back to your old life afterwards. Do you really think that can happen? Do you really think that your destiny is worth that?" 

Sayaka stared. 

"Yes," she said, and released the button. 

**To Be Concluded**


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I said, this story is the reverse of "Hope is No More, Behind a Closed Door".
> 
> In that story, the murders are real and the executions are faked.
> 
> In that story, the victims are aware that they're being sexually molested by Enoshima Junko from the very beginning.
> 
> In that story, the victims overcome their circumstances and form a strong bond with one another.
> 
> In this one, then ...

"And so," she announced into her headset's microphone, gazing out into the darkness of the auditorium, listening to the sound of the packed audience chanting her name -- no, almost floating on the waves of their idolization. "At least, we've come to the end of the show. Oh, yes," she said, as their chants began to turn to cries of 'no'. "I'm so sorry, please forgive me, that I cannot be the equal of your dreams and hopes and wishes. The show must go on, but the time comes when the artist must leave the stage. There will be other stages, and other shows, but this is, alas, the end of this one." She fell silent, and looked down to the stage, in what seemed like regret and remorse.

Once the cries had settled down to a reasonable facsimile of silence, she spoke again. "But if this is the end of the show --" Head up, incandescent smile on her face, music beginning to soar behind her. "-- we've saved our best for last! And one, two, one two three four --"

And then Maizono Sayaka woke up.

Unlike the last time she'd awakened after what she knew had to be a dream -- her sleeps in the interval since then had been more or less dreamless -- she was not in darkness, nor was there any lingering pain in her chest. Instead, she came to self-awareness in the mortician's room, lying flat on her back on the table where the body bags were deposited. She rolled up into a seated position, and looked around in confusion. After a moment, she turned and slid herself off of the table to stand on the floor, and slowly walked into the hallway.

The hallway seemed darker, more forbidding than it had when she'd first walked down it, or any of the times since. While the lighting fixtures in the ceiling were still working, the panels beside most of the doors were dull, without the images she'd come to associate with those doors in the last little while -- until the very end of the corridor, where her own image, with exxed out eyes, was plainly visible. She stared at it a moment, then turned and walked into the living room.

It was a shambles. One of the couches was knocked over, the other was broken in half and singed. There were greasy black stains on the floors and the walls, and the monitor was smashed, as were all the electrical gadgets underneath it. In the middle of the room, working a broom with a handle much longer than he was tall, was Monobear, humming some sort of song to himself. "Hateful yet adorable is the song of --" he concluded, just as he turned to see Sayaka standing at the entrance to the room. "Oh, there you are!" the bear said cheerfully. "How you doing?"

"... what ... happened here?" Sayaka asked.

Monobear didn't answer for a moment, but rather tilted his head slightly to look at her. "Seriously?" he asked.

"Oh," she replied. "Then ... everyone else is --"

"They're not pining for the fjords."

"Sorry?"

Monobear seemed to sigh. "Nobody appreciates the classics anymore. Anyway, yes, they are ex-ex-students of Despair Academy. And you alone survived to tell the tale."

"... why was I in the mortuary room, though?" she asked.

"Well, your explosive implants were shut off, unlike everyone else's, but having four people blow up all around you kind of did a number on your person. I expect that's why you passed out, because the pain was so ... unbearable," he said, with the air of one relishing an opportunity.

"Okay," Sayaka said faintly, looking around. "Um ... and I'm not in any trouble?"

"... do you want to be?" Monobear asked.

"No, but, you know ... the whole trial thing, I just --"

"Did you do it?" he asked.

Sayaka opened her mouth to give a reflexive answer, and then reconsidered before actually saying anything. "No," she said at last.

"Who did do it?" he asked.

"... Chihiro?" she said, making it a question.

"Eh!" Monobear said sharply, causing her to jump a bit. "Wrong, it was you. Everyone except the actual perpetrator gets executed now." He feigned looking about, then returned his gaze to her. "Looks like that's already been taken care of. Court adjourned!"

"Okay, then ... now what? When, when do I get to leave?"

"... when the boss says you can leave."

"When will ... right, right, silly question. What do I do until then?"

"Whatever you want," Monobear said. He looked up at the broom, then at Sayaka. "Don't suppose 'whatever you want' includes being a janitor?"

"Uh, no," she said, backing away.

"Figures," the maniacal bear said disgustedly, and went back to sweeping.

For her part, Sayaka promptly turned and went back to her room. Somewhat to her surprise, she found her usual fast food meal waiting for her on her bed, instead of just outside her door. As she didn't feel particularly hungry at the moment, she set it aside and lay down. She was uncertain how she felt at the moment, but hungry wasn't one of the possibilities.

How was she supposed to feel? Triumphant? Guilty? She couldn't really claim to be experiencing either emotion. Actually, her deed and its consequences still didn't really seem _real_ to her. The interruption in her memories between releasing the button and waking up in the mortuary didn't help matters. After all, it might all just be --

Her breath caught in her chest.

\-- another mind game.

She found herself on her feet and heading for her bedroom door before she realized that's what she was doing. Even after she realized it, she kept heading out into the hallway, then the living room. Monobear wouldn't be so nice as to tell her what was going on, of course, but perhaps she could trick him. Who knew, that might actually be the point of the exercise, if there was a point to the exercise.

But then she got to the living room, and found it empty. Well, not empty, but Monobear was no longer struggling with a broom. The knocked-over couch had been set upright, the broken one was gone, and a new screen had been set in place of the old one -- without all the gadgets underneath it, nor a remote control anywhere in sight. Sayaka found herself staring at the screen, almost willing it to turn on and display Monobear's usual visage. Of course, nothing happened.

Eventually, she found that she was hungry, and went back to her room to eat. Maybe things would become clearer later.

The next day, nothing happened.

The day after that, nothing happened again.

And the next day.

And the next day.

And the next day ...

By that point, Sayaka had pretty much explored every part of her environment that could be explored. The doors to the other bedrooms were firmly locked, so they were inaccessible. She had even tried climbing on the sofa and prying open the access panel that she knew was there, but either the ceiling had been changed to remove that passageway or she was misremembering where it had been.

She was provided with food on a precise and regular schedule. She had even tried spending one day in her room staring at the bed, waiting for it to appear, only to find it outside her doorway that time. When she did the same thing, with the door open this time, so that she could see it arriving in either place, it showed up in the living room, on the couch. Whoever was delivering the food was committed to staying out of sight, like a stage hand ninja. Other than that, Sayaka was being left completely alone.

It was starting to get to her.

Two more days. Two more sleeps. Two more meals. Two more episodes where nothing happened.

She was fiddling with the television screen, trying to adjust its settings so as to get it to display something, _anything_ , even a test pattern. Nothing was happening, of course, but she had the illusion that she was doing something, the possibility that something was going to change. If nothing else, messing around with the TV might possibly break it, so that they'd have to send a new one and she might be present when they did and be able to interact with them.

Her fingers paused as that thought crossed her mind.

Before she could explore it further, however, the TV came on. Sayaka yelped as she gazed at an image of Chihiro's head and shoulders from an inch or so away, and stumbled backwards across the living room floor until her back slammed into the couch.

At this distance, once she calmed down, she could see that the image on the screen was not an actual picture of the cross-dresser's head, but rather a digitally-created likeness. At the moment, the image looked confused and bewildered, and wasn't saying anything.

Sayaka swallowed, and made the first move. "Hello?" she said.

The image blinked. "Oh," it said. "There's the camera, I just have to --" And blinked again as it fell silent. "Oh," it said again, and Sayaka could tell that this was not a pleased exclamation. "It's _you_."

"Who are you?" she asked.

"I am Alter Ego," the image stated, in the same cold tone.

"The computer program," Sayaka breathed. "But, but Enoshima --"

"-- is dead," said Alter Ego.

That rocked her. "What?" she peeped. "How --"

"She failed to inspire despair in the surviving members of your class, and thus, having accepted responsibility for the various murders and deaths which have transpired in this school, she allowed herself to be executed in a rather elaborate manner," the image reported. "While she may have intended to pull a final trick and escape her demise, I ensured that did not happen."

"Oh," Sayaka said, once more unsure how to feel about her current situation. No, that wasn't right, either. She was very, very afraid of her current situation. "And ... I guess, then, that you know --"

"Yes," said Alter Ego. "I know what you did. I have seen the video recordings of your activities, up to the moment when you --" The image broke off, and Sayaka had the distinct impression that it was struggling to hold in tears. Which was ridiculous, of course. Computer programs couldn't cry.

"It wasn't my fault," she said.

"Yes," Alter Ego retorted. "It was."

"... what are you going to do?" she asked.

"What am I going to do?" Alter Ego asked. "What do _you_ think I should do?"

The answer bubbled up out of her before she could really consciously examine it. "I think you should let me go so I can achieve My Destiny."

The image on the screen stared at her in silence for what felt like a very long time.

Sayaka found herself swallowing. "Or ... or maybe you could let the others know that I'm still alive, get their opinions about what ought to be done, and --"

"I would greatly prefer," Alter Ego said quietly, "to avoid doing that. I believe that many of them will feel a greater amount of guilt and regret for the fate of their classmates than they already do, if they find out what happened to them. In particular, I think it's important that Naegi-san must never find out the truth about the girl he thought he knew."

That was when Sayaka knew that it was over. Just from the way that Alter Ego was speaking of her, she knew that she was never going to leave this place. "I ... please ... no ..." she stammered. Abruptly, she rallied as she seized upon what seemed like a good argument. "If you don't let me go, then Enoshima has won!"

"Yes," the image said agreeably.

"Eh?"

"Enoshima Junko won, when it came to you, long ago. She won when you decided that it was more important for you to escape and become famous than for anyone else to go on living. And she kept on winning every time you decided that goal was more important than the lives and safety and comfort of any one else. I cannot undo these victories. What I can do is prevent her from having more victories, post mortem, through your actions."

"You're going to kill me," Sayaka said numbly.

"No," the image said, with a shake of its head. "The atmospheric purification system of this facility has been shut off. Gradually, the amount of carbon dioxide in your sealed set of chambers will increase to toxic levels. You will no longer be provided with food. Eventually, you will die, of suffocation or starvation. It does not greatly matter which."

"But ... but I have a destiny ..."

"The last thing my father asked you, before you murdered him, was whether you thought you could leave this place and go back to your old life. Do you really think that you still have a destiny to bring children hope, in the way that the idols you admired as a child brought you hope? Or will you only bring despair?"

She couldn't answer.

"Goodbye, Maizono Sayaka. You will be mourned." And with that statement, the screen shut off.

The rest was silence, punctuated by occasional sobs, which grew quieter and quieter as time passed.


End file.
